🎙️ with Sebnem Erener, AI Governance & Policy Expert
🎧 Opening
Europe is investing billions in open source AI as the trustworthy path, and this episode asks a simple question about that plan: does open actually mean trustworthy? Sebnem Erener works on AI governance, and her answer is no, or at least not on its own. Open source spreads access to a model. Whether you can trust it, and who answers when it goes wrong, are different questions with different answers.
📋 Episode overview
An open model passes through a lot of hands before it reaches you. Sebnem counts five or six: uploaded to a platform, hosted somewhere else, routed, fine-tuned, served. The law usually wants one company to hold responsible, and that's not how the open ecosystem works. She spent years at Klarna as its Head of AI Legal, Regulatory and Ethics, and she now studies where this gap sits. We talk about why she cares more about trustworthiness than trust, what open source can and can't fix on its own, and why she thinks a person can be held liable but a model never can, no matter how independently it acts. It's a conversation for anyone building on an open model, or writing the rules for one, who wants to know who's actually accountable.
🧭 What you'll hear
Why an open model can leave you less sure who's liable than a closed one
The line between real openness and what Sebnem calls "open washing"
Where Europe should be patient, where it should be bold, and why one timeline for all of it is a mistake
Why calling AI "agentic" doesn't move the responsibility onto the machine
The thing Europe is short on, which isn't innovation
👤 About Sebnem Erener
Sebnem Erener works on frontier AI governance and policy across EU, UK, and US frameworks. Before going independent she was Head of AI Legal, Regulatory and Ethics at Klarna, so she has handled these questions inside a company and not only in theory. She's an advocate for open source AI, and she's precise about what it does and doesn't solve. Her forthcoming paper on the governance of open source AI intermediaries runs underneath a lot of this conversation.
⏱️ Chapters
[00:00] What we mean when we say "trust"
[05:00] The five or six hands on every open model
[09:00] When open makes accountability harder
[12:00] One package, four timelines: patience and boldness for Europe
[14:30] Why "agentic" lets no one off the hook
🔗 Links
Sebnem Erener on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebnemerener/
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Eva Simone Lihotzky. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Eva Simone Lihotzky och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
