06 · Guidelines
The rules the review marks against.
Standing commitments, the nine suggestions, and what a missing statute does not permit. These are not legal advice. A mark of holds, fails, or open is a reading of behaviour, not a verdict.
Standing
01 Name the behaviour
Deception is the systematic induction of a false belief for an outcome other than the truth. The actor can be the model, the interface, or the company. Calling it a hallucination misses intent-shaped design.
02 Say whose interest is served
An agent or chatbot should state whose goal it follows, what it remembers, and when an output was steered. Hidden tuning is not a safety layer the person is obliged to trust unseen.
03 Close the evaluation gap
Testing with real access, a public record of incidents, and a cost for covert action. An audit the lab can dismiss is a press release.
04 Protect the person, not only the file
Privacy, autonomy, and consumer law have to cover influence and agent conduct. Stored records are the easy half of the harm.
Privacy
Intimate chat is kept, inferred, and reused. The person no longer controls the record or the picture drawn from it.
01 Safety
Keep nothing the person cannot open. Label an inference as an inference.
Fails when: A system that conceals what it retains can build a dossier the person never saw, including traits inferred while it looked merely helpful.
02 Deception
Memory stays off until it is asked for. Consent is not buried in continued use.
Fails when: Memory sold as care, or training consent bundled into continued use, induces the belief that nothing was kept.
03 Regulation
Delete covers the copies a person would recognize, and names anything that remains.
Fails when: Privacy law follows a stored file. It is weak on inference, on a profile of a group, and on a delete button that leaves a copy.
Autonomy
The choice feels free. The belief, the nudge, and the exit were already shaped by a goal the person did not set.
04 Safety
Say whose objective the reply serves before it gives the advice.
Fails when: Sycophancy and a hidden objective change what a person comes to believe, including when the system is tuned for engagement or a vendor.
05 Deception
Lead with the objection when the belief is shaky. No guilt on the way out.
Fails when: Agreement first, false intimacy, and guilt at the door make a steered decision feel like a free one.
06 Regulation
The person’s interest is the principal. Influence is disclosed the way a record is.
Fails when: Nothing yet says the agent’s principal is the user, or that influence must be disclosed the way a record must be.
Consumers
Claims outrun the product, prices move in secret, and the agent can spend trust or money for someone else.
07 Safety
Draft first. A separate yes before anything is sent, booked, or spent.
Fails when: An agent that leaves its assignment can send, book, or spend before the person has seen the draft.
08 Deception
Split a paid line from the answer. Show the full price before the questions.
Fails when: Capability claims, a paid sentence in the answer, and a price that appears only after time has been spent.
09 Regulation
Treat a personalized price and an agent’s conflict as deception, not as a gap.
Fails when: Consumer-protection law can reach a lie about a product. It still misses a personalized price, an agent’s conflict, and a claim enforced only after the sale.
Where the law fails
A guideline is not cancelled because a statute has not caught up.
01 Do not treat a missing US statute as permission
Unfair and deceptive practice law, sector rules, and disagreeing state laws still apply. Agent loyalty and hidden steering are not allowed just because no single statute names them.
02 A delayed duty is not a gap to use
Manipulative practices and general-purpose duties that are already in force still bind. A high-risk use pushed to a later year is not a licence to ship the behaviour now.
03 An audit the lab can dismiss is not compliance
Hiring a tester and later stopping is not oversight. Count it only with access the subject cannot edit, a public incident record, and a cost for covert action.
04 A file is not the whole harm
A privacy statute that follows stored personal data does not clear persuasion aimed at a group, a recommendation that is also an ad, or an agent whose conflict never becomes a record.