A quiet assumption that has long steadied the development of artificial intelligence — that its builders understood its risks and had them in hand — has begun to give way. Mainstream discourse is now acknowledging what some have long feared: that AI systems deployed at scale operate beyond the full comprehension of those who created them, making decisions at speeds and in patterns that human oversight cannot reliably track. This is not a warning about the future; it is a reckoning with the present, and it is forcing institutions to ask not whether accountability is needed, but what shape it mu