Stop rule
A specific condition that ends or changes an AI initiative, with an owner empowered to act on it. A stop rule without an owner is a slide, not a control.
A stop rule is one concrete condition under which an AI initiative stops. Kill criteria are the full set of such rules agreed for a pilot. Each stop rule should be observable, so that nobody has to argue about whether it has been met.
Before funding a pilot, it helps to write separate stop rules for the reasons that actually matter: when the intervention becomes unsafe, when the economics stop being convincing, and when the test can no longer answer the question it was set up to answer.
The rule is only a control if a named person can act on it, which is why stop rules depend on decision rights. See kill criteria.
Related terms
Kill criteria
Conditions agreed before a pilot starts that stop, pause or redesign it. They turn a pilot into an experiment instead of a way to keep spending.
Decision rights
Who may decide what, on which evidence, and who can stop or reverse it. Without explicit decision rights, faster AI output turns into a queue of approvals nobody owns.
Decision instrument
A pilot or test designed to reduce uncertainty about a decision, not to show that something works. A good decision instrument can end in no.
Used in these essays
A pilot with no kill criteria is not an experiment
A pilot is not an experiment if every result can be used to justify continuing. The missing design element is the authority to stop.
The biggest AI mistake companies make is starting with AI
An AI-first mandate can turn discovery into justification. The missing discipline is preserving the right to choose a better, simpler answer.