AI Deployment Accountability Engineering: A Vision for Accountable AI in Safety-Critical Socio-Technical Systems

Artificial intelligence systems are rapidly becoming critical components in healthcare, finance, public services, and other safety-critical domains. Yet the engineering practices used to evaluate these systems remain predominantly model-centric, emphasizing properties such as accuracy, robustness, fairness, and interpretability before deployment. These properties are necessary but insufficient once an AI system operates within an ever changing socio-technical environment characterized by distribution shifts, institutional constraints, human feedback loops, privacy requirements, and interactions among multiple AI agents. This vision paper introduces AI Deployment Accountability Engineering (ADAE), a proposed AI engineering subdiscipline concerned with establishing measurable, continuous, and actionable accountability for deployed AI systems. ADAE treats accountability as a deployment-layer property rather than solely as a property of an individual model. It seeks to determine whether an AI-enabled system continues to operate within acceptable risk limits, identify the contexts in which failures emerge, attribute failures across interacting technical and human components, translate technical failures into downstream consequences, and support timely intervention. We articulate a research agenda built around four interconnected pillars: structured discovery of context-dependent failure modes, privacy-preserving accountability measurement, system-level risk analysis for agentic AI, and translation of technical failures into operational, and institutional risks. The broader goal is to establish foundational principles, mathematical tools, and system architectures for accountable AI deployment across safety-critical applications.