What it changes
Who can pull it
What it looks like institutionally
Uniform oversight is a budget spread thin. Tiering concentrates it: classify uses by consequence (adverse action against a person sits at the top), and attach mandatory human correction and ground-truth verification to the top tier, while lighter monitoring covers the rest.
The discipline is in the tier boundaries. Tiers defined by the system's convenience ("low risk" because review is expensive) invert the control. Tier by what a wrong output does to a person, and let the EU AI Act's treatment of benefits-eligibility systems as high-risk calibrate intuitions about where public-sector uses sit.
Tiering also makes ceilings manageable: if verification catches only a fraction, aim that fraction at the decisions that can least afford to be wrong.
In the Lab (v10) the two halves of this pattern live in different places: the reviewer-hours investment stays on the "Review the riskiest first" lever, while the tiered ROUTING artifact — the list that steers top-tier cases into mandatory review and lets lower tiers pass by design — is the placeable risk-tier triage worklist modifier, which carries the routing cap and the lower-tiers-trusted-by-design cost on the pathway it is tethered to.
Addresses: Uniformly thin oversight · High-stakes decisions on autopilot. Test a version of this lever in the PAN Lab.