“Policy without tools is basically poetry, right? It looks great. You can recite it, but you can't really protect people with it concretely.”
Possible · October 2026
François was asked what building a trust and safety function inside a company taught her that research from the outside could not. Her answer was that the safety debate fixes on rules because rules are the visible part, while the systems and infrastructure that enforce them get far less attention.
Transcript
about pirates here. But you also were inside of Niantic, as you mentioned. Yes. You know, accountable for outcomes in real time, you know, at an actual company that's pushing deliverables. What
did that teach you that sort of the researcher being outside of a company? Couldn't have taught you about this space.
I think it taught me how much tools matter. And if you take a step back and sort of look at the overall conversation that we're having on safety, there's been a lot of discussion on rules, right? What should be acceptable and not acceptable? And I understand that focus because I think rules are really the most visible part of the pyramid, right? It's the thing that we can all look at and negotiate together. I think I learned at NANDIC that policy without tools is basically poetry, right? It looks great. You can recite it, but you can't really protect people with it concretely. And so the importance of those systems, the importance of infrastructure, the importance of having multiple systems who you know will be interoperable and will work together, because a lot of important contexts that you need to protect people also get sort of lost in translation when there's a handoff between one process and another process, maybe one internal tool to another internal tool. I think that I got a unique, sort of very up-close and personal perspective when I built a trust and safety function.
Actually, tooling is really important, and it's one of the things that academia usually doesn't get because it's not quite the way that academia operates. So that's an excellent bring into the academic environment, generally, not just in safety, not just in open source, not just in.
And you know, Rhys was incubated at Columbia University, right, at the Institute for Global Politics. I think we forget that academia can also incubate amazing tech nonprofits, right? We look at big business schools and all the startups they incubate, but there's actually a nice tradition of amazing tech nonprofits being incubated out of academia. I think of like Scratch, love Scratch coming out of the MIT, right? So like universities here have a role to play. And yes, if they focus on boring things like tooling, we can get really far. Yes, it will help. It will help.
So I saw that your ABC framework was cited in Anthropic's report on AI MSUs. So one, a first, briefly tell us about the framework. And then the question is: does generative AI break the premise of the ABC framework? Because now that you can have a single actor synthesize actor behavior content all at once, does it work or does it need to be updated? So first framework and then that question.
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