Accountability Architecture

A simulated trial as a research method

Trial Trial

Trial Trial was a public-interest simulated criminal trial conducted by n-Space at Somerset House Studios in 2026. It used a fictionalised case assembled from documented reporting about AI-assisted targeting, and brought practising lawyers, expert witnesses and a citizen jury into a structured adversarial process.

The method matters more than the verdict. Policy discussion tolerates vagueness; cross-examination does not. When a barrister asks a witness exactly which version of the software was deployed, who saw the uncertainty display, and what the supplier did after notice — and the framework has no answer — the gap is exposed in a form a jury, and a committee, can see.

The courtroom as a test environmentClaim→Evidence→Cross-examination→Responsibility→RemedyEach step forces precision the policy debate can avoid.
The courtroom as a test environment.

The exercise asked

  • When does a supplier's contribution become legally relevant rather than incidental?
  • What happens when the state controls the strike but the supplier controls parts of the decision environment?
  • What should credible notice of harmful or out-of-envelope use require a supplier to do?
  • Can the current framework reconstruct the system's role after civilians are killed?
  • Does nominal human approval survive realistic operational tempo?

Findings

Trial Trial finding
A research finding from the simulated trial — a structured exercise, not a court judgment.
  • State duties remain central; supplier duties supplement rather than dilute them.
  • Supplier responsibility is fragmented across contract, regulation and criminal law, and difficult to establish in any of them.
  • Internal due diligence is usually not independently testable — the court had to take policies on trust or discard them.
  • Human-control claims are often asserted rather than measured; under cross-examination, assertion collapsed quickly.
  • Missing logs, changing software and secrecy can defeat later reconstruction, whatever the applicable law.
  • Adversarial simulation can reveal governance failures before deployment — cheaply, publicly and without waiting for casualties.

The case tried in Trial Trial was fictionalised. Nothing in the exercise establishes wrongdoing by any real company, person or state. Findings are research observations about the legal framework, not verdicts.

Participant names, images, quotations and filmed material are not published here; publication requires the participants' permission.

SOURCES [20] Trial Trial — original project documentation, n-Space, Somerset House Studios