Domains
Domain Atlas
“How does this show up in specific domains?”
Social services are a high-stakes frontier for AI governance: predictive scores and generative assistants already shape who gets investigated, helped, paid, and believed. Five domains, thirteen use cases, and 11 documented case files — every factual claim cited to the Evidence Registry.
Child welfare & family services
4 case filesPredictive screening and profiling where the cost of both false alarms and misses lands on families — and where the human override layer has measurably mattered.
Public benefits & eligibility
5 case filesFraud scoring, eligibility automation, and care allocation — the domain with the largest documented harms, almost all of them ending in courts and commissions.
Caseworker documentation & copilots
1 case fileGenerative assistants drafting the records institutions run on — where today's convenience becomes tomorrow's contaminated memory if review erodes.
Benefits navigation & public-facing chat
1 case fileConversational systems answering high-stakes questions for the public — where an authoritative wrong answer is indistinguishable, to its victim, from policy.
Housing, homelessness & behavioral-health triage
0 case filesScoring systems allocating scarce help among people in crisis — a domain the Atlas covers through its use cases and governance questions while its documented case base grows.
Institutional pressures
The recurring forces that bend deployed systems away from their evaluated behavior. Each domain page names the pressures that dominate it — this vocabulary is conceptual framing, drawn from the documented cases.
Caseload surge
Demand outruns staffing; per-case attention shrinks and review becomes triage.
Reviewer bottleneck
One fixed-capacity checking stage sits between AI output and consequence; everything queues behind it.
Austerity & recovery incentives
Cost-cutting and overpayment-recovery targets tilt the system toward denial and enforcement errors.
Vendor opacity
The deploying institution cannot inspect the model, data, or update pipeline it is accountable for.
Deadline pressure
Statutory or managerial timeliness rules reward fast approval of machine output over slow disagreement.
Staff turnover
Experienced skepticism leaves; new staff calibrate their trust on the tool itself.
Data & policy drift
The world, the intake process, and the rules change under a system trained on how things used to be.
Compliance over substance
Paper controls (sign-offs, checklists) satisfy audits while the behavior they describe erodes.
Want to see these pressures act on a system? Stress-test them in the PAN Lab →