First defined in Outpaced by AI by Waydell D. Carvalho.
Outcome: The truth is established accurately, and too late to change anything.
A multi-agency response that lands its finding years after a decision was made is a record, not a constraint. Coordination Neglect is the structural version of this: when the harm has propagated through many jurisdictions and the response is divided among bodies that never converge in time, the finding arrives after the moment it could have mattered.
The FCC's 2017 net-neutrality repeal is the example. The agency took public comments, and the comment record turned out to be corrupted by millions of fake submissions filed under real people's names without their knowledge. Multiple bodies eventually looked into it. The coordinated finding, that the record had been corrupted by an impersonation campaign at scale, was published years later. By then the repeal had been final for years.
The work was not neglected in the sense of being ignored. Several agencies, a state attorney general, congressional committees, and the FCC's own inspector general all engaged. The neglect was of coordination across time. Each body worked within its own scope, on its own schedule, against its own standard of proof. Assembling the integrated picture required subpoenas, cross-state cooperation, and forensic analysis, and that took years. The decision the inquiry was meant to inform took place at the end of the first year.
That is the mechanism. Splitting a response across many authorities is not the same as coordinating one. Each authority can be doing real work and the system can still fail to constrain anything, because the harm moves at one speed and the convergence of the responders moves at another. A correct finding delivered after the fact documents the failure; it does not prevent it.
AI-driven harms are especially exposed to this, because they cross borders and domains instantly while oversight stays carved into jurisdictions. A model deployed everywhere at once is answered by regulators who can each reach only their own corner of it, on timelines that do not line up. Unless someone is responsible for converging the response in time, coordination neglect guarantees the same outcome: an accurate account of what went wrong, arriving after it is over.