For three years, you have been telling your Legal/Compliance team: “Trust me, the AI is good.” And they have been saying: “Prove it.” You couldn’t. You couldn’t show them why the AI made a decision.
Then you run a Reasoning Dredge. You get a JSON object:
{
"trace": "Clause 4.2 contains a standard non-compete. However, Clause 12.1 overrides it with a specific exception for prior clients.",
"risk_assessment": "LOW"
}
You show this to the auditor. For the first time, they don’t look at you with suspicion. They look at the trace. They read the logic. They nod. They smile.
This is the Transparency Shock. It is the realization that the “Black Box” problem wasn’t a technical limitation of AI; it was a limitation of how we asked the AI.
The Trace Slot solves the Liability Crisis because it shifts responsibility.
We can now treat AI errors like “Logic Bugs” in code, not “Magic Spells” gone wrong. We can debug the Trace. We can write a regression test for that specific logic path. The Trace makes the system deterministic enough to be insured.
The paradigm shifts from “Trust” to “Verify.” We no longer ask users to “Trust the AI.” We say: “Here is the AI’s reasoning. Check it yourself.”
This “White-Box” approach is the key to unlocking high-stakes markets. A doctor will never trust a “Black Box” diagnosis. But a doctor will trust a diagnosis that comes with a citation list and a differential diagnosis trace ([DISCARDED_HYPOTHESIS: Flu]). The Trace respects the expert’s intelligence instead of asking for their blind faith.
The Transparency Shock opens the doors to the “Forbidden Markets.”
We realized that “Accuracy” wasn’t the blocker for these markets; “Explainability” was. Dredge solves Explainability for free (or rather, for $0.045/M). The gates are open.