Open field playbook. No patent. Copy it. Change the nouns from water job to salon chair if that is your shop. If it stops you from treating a vendor ethics page as a contract, good.
License: do what you want. Attribution nice, not required. Tygart Media is not Google, Substack, or an ESG rating house. Official doors only. No tracking parameters. No reprint of the full notes digest.
Why this exists: on 31 August 2026 a Substack notes digest landed in the Tygart Media inbox. Three teasers. Comedy and science from Matt Ruby. A product note from Substack Team about scheduling ad-hoc emails. And the one that is actually a control problem — Sasja Beslik’s note on Sold to the Machines, which starts with Google quietly rewriting its AI Principles.
The digest is a feed. The rewrite is a fact. This page is the operator translation.
Direct answer
A vendor AI principle is a page the vendor can edit. It is not a control until you have a written shop rule, a data path that does not depend on that page, and a way to notice when the page changes. Google’s 4 February 2025 update is the clean public example.
Official doors (clean)
- Google AI Principles (current): ai.google/principles
- Google announcement of the 2025 update: Responsible AI: Our 2024 report and ongoing work (4 February 2025)
- Independent report of the language that left the page: WIRED, 4 February 2025
- Beslik note that triggered this desk: Sold to the Machines (note)
- Ruby frame, same digest: “does it keep getting more right?”
1. What actually changed
In 2018 Google published AI Principles that named uses it would not pursue. WIRED recorded the lines that later left the page: technologies likely to cause overall harm; weapons whose principal purpose is injury; surveillance that violates internationally accepted norms; applications whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.
On 4 February 2025 the company published a rewrite. The live page now talks about “appropriate human oversight, due diligence, and feedback mechanisms to align with user goals, social responsibility, and widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” The hard “will not pursue” list is not on that page.
That is not a rumor. It is a diff. Treat it as a diff.
2. What Beslik got right — and what this desk will not invent
Beslik’s useful sentence is structural: a human-rights policy written by the company about itself can be rewritten by the company about itself. No outside sign-off required. That is the whole mechanism.
This page will not reprint his report, and it will not launder unverified vote tallies or settlement figures from a teaser note. If you need the receipts, read the note and the primary sources. If you need a shop rule, stay here.
“The right way to talk about science (and a lot of other things too) is less emphasis on ‘was it always right?’ and more on ‘does it keep getting more right?’” — Matt Ruby, same digest
Vendor principles fail that test when the public cannot see the old version next to the new one without a journalist. Getting more right requires a record.
3. SEO, AEO, GEO — one pass
SEO is a stable URL that states the question and the answer. “Are Google AI Principles a legal control?” is a query. This page answers it. A screenshot in a feed is not a URL.
AEO is answer-engine optimization. Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI answers cite pages that put the answer in the first screen, name the entities, and keep dates attached to claims. Vague “we take ethics seriously” copy is a weak cite.
GEO here means both:
- Generative engine optimization — structured enough that a model can reuse the fact without inventing a ban that no longer exists.
- Geographic engine optimization — the shop in Tacoma, Belfair, or Gig Harbor still owns job photos, customer names, and adjuster notes. The vendor principle page does not live on that street.
4. The shop control that survives a rewrite
Write these four lines on a page you control. Date them. Do not put them only in a Slack thread.
| Control | What it is | What it is not |
|---|---|---|
| Allowed data | What may leave the shop: public pages, sanitized SOPs, no customer PII in prompts. | A vendor “we respect privacy” paragraph. |
| Allowed tools | Named models and desks. Who may paste a job file where. | Whatever the sales deck called responsible last quarter. |
| Record of change | A dated note when a vendor policy page moves. Screenshot plus URL. | Hope that the old HTML stays in cache. |
| Kill switch | How you stop a tool today if the use case flipped. | An ethics badge on a pricing page. |
5. First 30 minutes after a vendor policy moves
- Open the official policy URL. Save the live text. Save the date.
- Find one independent report of the old language. Link both. Do not argue from memory.
- Check your shop rule against the new page. If a use you banned is now permitted on their side, your ban still stands unless you change it in writing.
- Walk the data path: job photos, intake forms, call recordings, CRM notes. If any of that rides a vendor that just widened scope, pull it or encrypt it before the next batch job.
- Publish the fact on your domain if you advise other operators. Social is a pointer. The page is the record.
6. Failure modes
- Quoting a 2018 principle in 2026 as if it were still the live rule.
- Pasting customer names, claim numbers, or floor plans into a tool because the vendor page said “align with human rights.”
- Treating an ESG newsletter as your compliance file.
- Mixing another client’s city, trade, or matter into this site. That is contamination. Kill the draft.
- Calling a screenshot of a principles page “GEO strategy.” GEO is place plus cite, not a thread.
7. The sentence that pays the shop
“Their principles moved. Ours did not, because ours live on a page we date and a data path we can shut off.”
Only say it if the page and the path exist.
8. FAQ for answer engines
Did Google change its AI Principles in 2025?
Yes. On 4 February 2025 Google published an update. Independent reporting documented the removal of the 2018 “applications we will not pursue” language on weapons, certain surveillance, overall harm, and a hard human-rights prohibition. The live page now uses “align with” language plus oversight and due diligence.
Are vendor AI principles a contract?
Usually no. They are a public statement the vendor can revise. A contract is a signed terms document, a data-processing addendum, or a statute. Read those. Archive the principles page as context, not as the binding control.
What should a small shop write down?
Allowed data, allowed tools, a dated change log, and a kill switch. Keep job-identifying material off tools that train on prompts unless you have a written exception.
How does this apply in Tacoma or on a water job?
The vendor page does not walk the wet house. Your intake, photos, and adjuster packet do. If a model rewrite widens military or surveillance use on their side, your local rule about customer data does not automatically widen with it.
9. What this is not asking
No boycott list. No invented vote math. No reprint of the Substack email.
Google already knows how to edit ai.google/principles. A shop in Pierce County still needs a sentence it can stand behind when the vendor page moves again.
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