Intel / article

Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)

Source: simonwillison.net
Date: Published Jul 12, 2026

Context

Simon Willison argues that an should not be the person ultimately answerable for a project. His short essay applies the idea of a directly responsible individual, or DRI, to organizations using AI agents.

Willison writes that the best definition he found was in the GitLab handbook, and that the term originated at Apple for the person "ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a specific project, initiative, or activity." His position is that humans can take accountability for their actions where machines cannot, so a machine performing work does not take over human accountability for it. This separates the assignment of tasks from the assignment of responsibility for their consequences.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.

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