Is it still a secret? – governance when AI reconstructs undisclosed information

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Michael Judin | Partner | Judin Combrinck Inc | mail me |

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For decades, businesses assumed that information in the public domain was harmless. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has ended that assumption.

By aggregating thousands of public data points, AI can reconstruct strategy, pricing and expansion plans. Under the King V Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa, protecting confidential value in this environment has become a board-level governance responsibility.

The end of “practical obscurity”

For decades, commercial agreements excluded “publicly available information” from the definition of confidential information. The premise was simple: what is public cannot be secret; what is not secret cannot be protected.

That premise belonged to an era of information scarcity.

Today, Synthetic Artificial Intelligence (SAI) systems can:

• Aggregate thousands of public data sources in seconds.
• Identify patterns invisible to human analysts.
• Infer pricing strategy from procurement disclosures.
• Reconstruct expansion plans from job postings.
• Map supply chain dependencies from logistics records; and
• Derive R&D trajectories from patent metadata.

Each data point may be public. The synthesis may not be.

AI collapses the distinction between “technically public” and “strategically re-constructible.” In doing so, it exposes a vulnerability in traditional thinking about confidentiality.

Under King V, that vulnerability is not merely contractual – it is governance.

King V’s framing – ethical, accountable and future-focused governance

King V deepens and sharpens the governance trajectory established in King IV.

Its emphasis on:…

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