Detecting Silent Governance Failure: Semantic Entropy, Dissent Exhaustion, and Circuit Breakers

Current AI governance focuses on the noise of failure—errors, bias, and misuse. However, in high-stakes bureaucracy, the most catastrophic failures manifest as silence. We introduce Resolution Collapse: a condition where human oversight persists as a procedural ritual, as organizational efficiency smooths away the friction required to distinguish routine cases from exceptions.

To address this, we shift the focus from error prevention to failure legibility. We propose Governance Drift Indicators (GDIs) to detect the semantic and temporal erosion of judgment before it becomes epistemically irreversible. Furthermore, we argue that when oversight collapses, "soft" interventions like retraining are insufficient. Instead, we introduce a Circuit Breaker architecture: a structural mechanism designed to halt or isolate AI-assisted processes when epistemic capacity is lost. Finally, we define the concept of a Proper Ending —a controlled termination that preserves institutional memory.