AI Governance Engineer
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Graduated degradation

By Updated

Pre-built, tested operating modes short of switching an AI system off: advice-only, raised confidence thresholds, grounded-only answers, disabling for one group, language or region, and a return to the pilot cohort. Each is an operational toggle with a named trigger 1.

Developed in
ch. 15, Graduated degradation
ch. 05, Pattern: Deactivation, Localisation & Retirement Runbook
Chapters
ch. 05, Patterns · ch. 15, Deployment · ch. 23, AI Agents
Contrast with
Kill switch
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Decommissioning

    The planned retirement of an AI system: dependency analysis, fallback and transition, sunset notices, a final evidence snapshot, archive or disposal of…

  • Localisation (by jurisdiction)

    Controlling where an AI system runs and which features it offers in each jurisdiction, with per-jurisdiction rule sets as code, regional instances where…

  • AI system

    For governance, the object the AI definition brings into scope.

Sources

  1. [1] "Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags)" (release, experiment, ops and permissioning toggles; ops kill switches for graceful degradation). Pete Hodgson, martinfowler.com. 2017-10-09. https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Graduated degradation. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/graduated-degradation. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026graduateddegradation,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Graduated degradation}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/graduated-degradation}
}