Across the long arc of human governance, the most consequential failures have rarely been acts of malice — they have been acts of convenience, moments when oversight was quietly handed to the very entities it was meant to constrain. That pattern is now repeating itself in the development of artificial intelligence, where the industry is increasingly delegating safety verification to the systems being built, framing this arrangement not as a risk but as progress. The question being raised is an old one dressed in new circuitry: who watches the watchers, and what happens when the answer is no on