“Where’s the switch, and who’s got their hand on it?”

DARPA just let an AI fly a fighter jet. The interesting part isn't the flying, it's the switch.

An ordinary F-16, not a drone

In August, DARPA and the US Air Force flew an F-16 under AI control as part of a program called VENOM (Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model). This wasn't a purpose-built drone, it was an ordinary operational F-16, retrofitted with a kit that lets a human pilot flip a physical switch between traditional controls and AI control, mid-flight, at any time. A human pilot stayed in the cockpit the entire time, watching, ready to take back the stick.

Humans in the loop, built into hardware

That's humans in the loop (HITL), the practice of keeping a person positioned to observe and intervene in an AI system rather than letting it run unsupervised, built into hardware, at the exact place where the stakes are highest.

I bring this up because I hear a version of the same question from almost every business owner I talk to about AI agents: “how do I know it won't do something I didn't want?” DARPA's answer, for a fighter jet, was to build an actual physical off switch that a human's hand stays near the whole time.

The same question, scaled down

Your business almost certainly isn't flying anything with an ejector seat. But the design principle scales down perfectly. Before you connect an AI agent to your invoicing, your inbox, or your customer records, ask the same question DARPA asked: where's the switch, and who's got their hand on it.

If you can't answer that, you're not ready to flip the AI on yet.

If you want help figuring out where that switch belongs in your own setup, that's exactly the kind of conversation worth having. Find me through the contact section of this site.