The Tenth Man

In plain language

When everyone agrees, one lens still argues the other side before the human sees the briefing.

In a sentence

• The Tenth Man challenged the unanimous recommendation before the founder reviewed the briefing.
• The Tenth Man line in the briefing read not invoked, which the public page counts as a legal answer.

Examples written for this glossary

Usage note

The public page makes the briefing line mandatory whether or not the objection fires, so that a reader can tell nothing was wrong from nobody having looked. A surviving objection cannot be quietly dropped for being inconvenient.

Not to be confused with

• Red teaming

  NIST describes AI red-teaming as a structured testing exercise that probes an AI system for flaws and vulnerabilities. The Tenth Man applies to a unanimous analysis and carries any surviving objection to a human.

  Source: Leadership (opens in a new tab)

  Source: NIST AI 600-1 (opens in a new tab)

Why it matters

A unanimous briefing can hide a shared blind spot; the dissent line lets the human see whether a contrary case was examined.

See also

• Lenses

  Review perspectives that Orbyt requires an agent seat to apply to its draft, drawn chiefly from named people's published work.

• Sycophancy

  Tendency of a language model to tailor its responses to a user's stated beliefs or preferences at the expense of accuracy.

• Human in the loop

  Arrangement in which a person supplies data, review, correction, or approval at a specified stage of an AI system's work.