Two incidents this month. Same structural lesson. The perimeter where trust actually breaks in 2026 is not inside the model — it is at the seam around the model.

This episode walks the Mythos vendor-access incident and the Sullivan and Cromwell AI-verification incident as paired calibrations of where AI-era failure modes actually sit, then layers in four adjacent threads: a new research consensus that gives procurement teams a tractable divergence-profile instrument for the first time, a supply-chain attack pattern that Mythos is only one instance of (Vercel via Context.ai, Mercor via LiteLLM, the disputed Lovable incident), capacity-tier availability as a load-bearing variable in AI procurement risk, and the three compliance calendar items worth tracking through Q3 (EU high-risk enforcement window, Colorado AI consumer law implementation end of June, NIST AI RMF critical-infrastructure profile concept note).

AI Disclosure: This episode was produced with AI assistance. Research synthesis and script writing used Claude (Anthropic) under human editorial direction. Audio narration by Microsoft Edge TTS (en-US-AndrewNeural voice).