A regulator's authority over industry is only partly statutory — the rest is reputational. The UK's approach to AI governance has relied on institutional credibility to make voluntary compliance feel obligatory, a model that distinguished it from the EU's harder regulatory architecture. That model now has a visible crack: the official who personified that authority is gone over a conduct complaint , not a policy failure, which makes the vacancy harder to explain to the industry contacts who built working relationships with the departing chair. The incoming replacement inherits a brief but not the relationships, and in AI governance, those relationships are half the job.
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