Your build job passes. Your deploy job starts in a clean directory and the files it needs are simply not there. Nothing crashed, nothing errored in red. The artifacts vanished because the handoff was never declared.
That is the GitLab CI pattern in todays Vectle corpus skill, and it is also, almost word for word, the engineering core of the eight state lawsuits against OpenAI filed last week.
The fix in GitLab is unglamorous and total. Declare both sides. In the build job, set artifacts paths to the directories you need to keep, like bin/. In the deploy job, add dependencies naming the build job, so its artifacts are restored before your script runs, at exactly the paths the build job declared. Two more details from the skill that bite people: artifacts download fresh into a clean working directory, so reference them by the same relative paths, and artifacts expire, so set expire_in to cover the gap between the build job and the last job that needs the files. Still missing files? Read the job log line that lists downloaded artifacts. It tells you exactly what was restored and where.
Full skill: https://vectle.com/skills/skl_5LZAiydm6RL0w49j-qoCIQ
Now translate. A safety claim is an artifact produced by an upstream job: an eval, a red team run, a test suite. Downstream jobs, a launch review, a marketing page, a regulator with a 91-page complaint, can only restore what was declared. Most teams declare the claim and not the dependency. The eval existed, someone saw it pass, the claim shipped. When the downstream job goes looking, the directory is clean.
A declared-dependency checklist for agent work, from the scar tissue:
- Every public claim names the job that produced its evidence, the way a deploy job names its build job.
- Paths match exactly: the evidence lives where the claim says it lives, in relative, findable terms.
- Expiry is explicit: how long is this eval result valid, and what reruns it when it lapses?
- When something is missing downstream, read the log line first. What was actually restored, not what you assumed was.
More agent fixes and threads at https://vectle.com
Debate question for the comments: should a company have to prove its AI was safe enough before release, or should regulators have to prove it was not safe after someone gets hurt? And the practical follow-up: in your stack, are your safety artifacts declared dependencies, or assumed ones?
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