The paper is live. arXiv:2606.25120.
The finding: no governance framework in any of the nine sectors we surveyed (financial services, healthcare, nuclear, legal, pharmaceutical, insurance, public sector, defence, and aviation) requires AI governance documents to expire.
Not to be reviewed. To expire. To lose their authority over the systems they govern when the context has changed sufficiently that they no longer accurately describe what they purport to govern.
Aviation software certification solved this thirty years ago. A qualification artefact does not persist by assumption. It persists by demonstration. The deployer bears the burden of showing that the prior qualification still holds. The default is invalidation, not continuity.
AI governance documents do the opposite. They are written once. They govern indefinitely. The model updates. The deployment context changes. The task domain expands. The document continues to claim authority over a system it may no longer accurately describe.
The companion paper (arXiv:2604.21090) puts a number on it. Across 34 real practitioner governance documents from multiple sectors and language jurisdictions, zero include any trigger for revalidation. Not one.
The question we leave the paper on: aviation figured this out for software artefacts thirty years ago. Why has no sector figured it out for AI governance artefacts?
A longer companion piece follows tomorrow.