Most enterprises now spend more on AI governance than ever — and AI incidents keep happening anyway.

The Responsible AI Paradox explains why: governance built for compliance theater collapses the moment nobody's watching, while governance built for symbolic approval never touches the code that actually ships.

Drawing on original PhD research and real-world cases — from Uber's autonomous vehicle crash to the Replit agent that deleted production data — Josep Curto gives executives, risk officers, and boards a concrete framework for building AI governance that survives contact with real engineering pressure: Governance Gates with actual veto power, a system for allocating scarce executive attention, and a playbook for turning responsible AI from a defensive cost center into a source of competitive advantage.