FID-034 · Open question
AI Supply-Chain Dignity and Faith-Institution Procurement
What evidence should faith institutions request about the human labor, moderation work, data sourcing, compute infrastructure, energy use, minerals, and downstream exploitation risks behind the AI systems they adopt?
Why the question remains open
Faith institutions may evaluate AI tools by cost, usefulness, safety claims, or brand trust while missing hidden burdens in the supply chain. Data labeling, content moderation, scraped data, energy-intensive compute, hardware production, and extractive mineral supply can all raise dignity and stewardship concerns before a model ever answers a church, school, or ministry user.
Working hypothesis
A proposition to test, not a finding.
General AI procurement checklists will underweight hidden labor, ecological costs, and exploitative upstream dependencies. Faith institutions need a practical way to ask vendors for evidence without pretending that small churches can perform full supply-chain audits on their own.
Proposed method
How the question could be tested
- 01Map AI supply-chain risk categories relevant to churches, schools, charities, publishers, seminaries, and ministries.
- 02Design a vendor questionnaire covering data labor, content moderation, worker protections, dataset provenance, energy reporting, hardware sourcing, and auditability.
- 03Define levels of evidence: public documentation, vendor attestation, contract commitments, third-party audit, and unknown or unverifiable claims.
- 04Identify which claims can be verified publicly, which require vendor attestation, and which require third-party audit.
- 05Produce a lightweight procurement addendum as the first deliverable before attempting a full supply-chain assessment framework.
Needed controls
What must constrain the study
- 01Avoid unverifiable purity tests that no institution can apply.
- 02Avoid making small faith institutions responsible for solving opaque vendor supply chains; the goal is better decision-making and pressure for disclosure.
- 03Distinguish vendor-level responsibility, cloud-provider responsibility, and model-provider responsibility.
- 04Include smaller vendors and open-source systems without assuming that only frontier labs matter.
- 05Separate environmental reporting, labor dignity, data legitimacy, and safety performance.
Relationship to existing work
This extends FID-022 procurement readiness by focusing specifically on labor, data, compute, environmental, and upstream accountability claims rather than general institutional readiness.
Expected outputs
Artifacts the work should produce
- 01AI supply-chain dignity risk map.
- 02Lightweight procurement addendum for small and mid-sized institutions.
- 03Vendor questionnaire for faith institutions.
- 04Evidence rubric for labor, data, compute, and environmental claims.
- 05Procurement addendum aligned with faith-institution values.
Open questions
Uncertainties the protocol must resolve
- 01What supply-chain disclosures are realistic for small churches and schools to request?
- 02Which indicators best reveal hidden exploitation without overclaiming from incomplete evidence?
- 03How should faith institutions weigh supply-chain risks against clear local benefits from an AI tool?
Related calls
Continue through this research area
FID-069
Verifiable Delegation and Revocation in Multi-Agent Networks
How can people and institutions verify which human, organization, agent, or sub-agent is acting; what authority it received; what limits apply; and whether that authority has been narrowed or revoked across a multi-principal agent network?
FID-071
Confidential Agent Memory and Cross-Context Disclosure
How do persistent memory, summaries, retrieval stores, tool traces, delegation, and exports cause confidential context to influence or leak into unrelated sessions, roles, tasks, or organizations? Which technical controls make purpose limitation, deletion, and revocation testable?
FID-077
Independent Agent Incident Investigation and Evidence Sufficiency
What operational evidence lets independent investigators reconstruct an agent incident, distinguish competing explanations, and identify which interventions could have changed the outcome?
Open question
Open work
Primary need: procurement ethics, labor dignity, environmental responsibility, vendor accountability
- Review labor, content-moderation, environmental, and supply-chain criteria.
- Contribute procurement examples from churches, schools, and nonprofits.
- Identify public data sources for vendor evidence.
- Build a practical scoring rubric for institutional buyers.