Research

Original work on decision quality, board judgment and adversarial artificial intelligence. Open, pre-registered and verifiable methodology.

Copertina: Cognitive Sovereignty
PAPER I
Cognitive Sovereignty
Protecting the quality of leadership decisions in the age of AI
When AI flatters, leadership judgment erodes silently. A theoretical construct — cognitive sovereignty — and a governance framework for boards and committees. The why.
FrameworkOSF · DOI2026IT / EN

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Copertina: Calibrated Dissent
PAPER II
Calibrated Dissent
A verifiable protocol for auditing adversarial AI forecasts — public N=10 M&A pilot
How to measure an AI that challenges decisions, without hindsight. A seal-and-resolution protocol and an immutable public ledger. Pre-registered on OSF. The how.
MethodsOSF · DOI2026IT / EN

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Copertina: The Cognitive Contradictor
ESSAY
The Cognitive Contradictor
How to defend the sovereignty of your mind in the age of an AI that always says you’re right
The general-audience version of the two papers: the diagnosis, the method in six moves, the measure. An essay in thirteen chapters, a work in preparation. The central excerpt is available.
EssayIn preparation2026IT / EN

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The two papers are companions: one grounds the concept, the other builds its measure. The essay carries them outside academia.

Why a research section

This section collects Francesco Saverio Canepa’s original research on a question that professional practice makes more urgent by the day: what happens to the quality of judgment — of a board, an investment committee, an advisor — when analysis is intensively assisted by artificial intelligence. Twenty years of extraordinary-finance transactions teach that the worst decisions rarely come from a lack of analysis: they come from analysis that confirms what one wanted to hear.

The two papers approach the problem from complementary directions. Cognitive Sovereignty defines the construct and the governance framework: what must be protected, and by which principles. Calibrated Dissent builds the measuring instrument: a protocol to verify, without hindsight, whether an AI designed to challenge decisions dissents accurately.

Method: open, pre-registered, verifiable

The research follows three methodological commitments. Pre-registration: the Calibrated Dissent protocol is registered on OSF with a public DOI before any outcome is observable. Verifiability: every pilot forecast is sealed in a public, append-only ledger — the Observatory — with a double anchor, SHA-256 and OpenTimestamps on the Bitcoin blockchain: anyone can independently verify that the published content existed before a given date. Falsifiability: resolution rules are deterministic, defined over canonical public sources and compared against pre-registered baselines.

What this research does NOT claim

The public N = 10 pilot illustrates the protocol; it does not prove its efficacy — it is explicitly non-evidence. The Δ-CSI measures the intensity of the challenge, never the correctness of the decision. Confirmatory claims belong to a powered Phase 2, whose analysis plan is pre-registered.

Trajectory

The outcomes of the ten pilot forecasts mature over 2027–2029 windows and will be resolved under the deposited rules. In parallel, Phase 2 will extend the sample beyond the statistical power threshold required for the first confirmatory tests. Updates and full materials remain accessible from the individual paper pages and the OSF project.

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OSF project, public ledger and reference implementation.