# AI verification proposal

A proposal built with the Proposal Explorer of the AI Verification Tech Map (https://trustbutveri.fyi/), from its records of 2026-10-09. Interactive version: https://trustbutveri.fyi/explorer/?mechanisms=M-0023,M-0001&hide=weights,io,training

How to read it: a claim is something one party wants to verify about another's AI hardware or software. A mechanism is a general technique for verifying claims; it is "aimed at" a claim when that is its direct purpose, and "supporting" when it contributes without being aimed at it. A claim is addressed when a mechanism in the proposal is aimed at it and is not excluded by the filters; addressed does not mean verified, so check that mechanism's development status, security evidence and findings. Definitions: https://trustbutveri.fyi/about/methodology/ (roles, properties and findings) and https://trustbutveri.fyi/about/readiness/ (development status).

## Filters

Filters apply to mechanisms only and describe the setting the proposal is for.

- **Keep hidden from the verifier: model weights, inputs and outputs, training data.** Removes mechanisms that show the asset to the verifier. Conditional or unspecified exposure stays with a note and needs checking against the privacy requirement. Model weights: the checked model's parameters. Inputs and outputs: the requests a deployed model serves and its responses. Training data: what a model was trained on. Each mechanism's exposure is the editors' reading of its record: shown, depends on the design (kept, with a note), hidden, not involved, or unspecified for a selected implementation. Code and configuration are not covered yet.

23 of 25 mechanisms on the map pass these filters.

## Overview

One row per mechanism, read from its record. Open failures: critical / significant / minor. The last three columns are the editors' reading of what the verifier sees. Findings are grouped as known failures, scope limitations and open questions. Only known failures count as failures. Counts are an inventory of published findings, not a risk score.

| Mechanism | Development | Security evidence | Prover | Attack testing | Hardware | Open failures | Weights | Inputs and outputs | Training data |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Safeguard attestation | Research demonstration | Published security analysis | Semi-trusted | Analysis | Existing features | 0 / 2 / 0 | depends | depends | not involved |
| Sampled inference recomputation | Operational use | Published security analysis | Adversarial | Analysis | None | 0 / 2 / 1 | depends | depends | not involved |

## Claims

No claims chosen.

## Mechanisms

### Safeguard attestation

Hardware-signed evidence that an AI service sent a given response through its declared safeguard path, such as a wrapper that calls a guardrail classifier. ([Safeguard attestation](https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/safeguard-attestation/))

- Assessment: mechanism family.
- Development: Research demonstration (legacy code R2), assessed for attesting that a declared safeguard mediated a service's responses.
- Security evidence: Published security analysis. Independent evaluation: unassessed. Formal proof: unassessed. Deployment assurance: unassessed.
- Claims in this proposal: none of them.
- Threat model: semi-trusted prover. Hardware: existing features. Prover cooperation: required. Attack testing: analysis. Category: Cryptographic & computational.
- What the verifier sees: model weights depends; inputs and outputs depends; training data not involved. The enclave route signs hashes of the safeguard, request and response; a low-trust design has the verifier re-run and screen sampled requests itself.
- Filter note: May show model weights, depending on the design. The enclave route signs hashes of the safeguard, request and response; a low-trust design has the verifier re-run and screen sampled requests itself.
- Filter note: May show inputs and outputs, depending on the design. The enclave route signs hashes of the safeguard, request and response; a low-trust design has the verifier re-run and screen sampled requests itself.

### Sampled inference recomputation

A verifier re-runs a random sample of an AI provider's logged queries on a trusted copy of the declared model and checks the outputs match. ([Sampled inference recomputation](https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/))

- Assessment: mechanism family.
- Development: Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for checking untrusted workers' activations against the declared model, prompt and precision.
- Security evidence: Published security analysis. Independent evaluation: unassessed. Formal proof: unassessed. Deployment assurance: unassessed.
- Claims in this proposal: none of them.
- Threat model: adversarial prover. Hardware: none. Prover cooperation: required. Attack testing: analysis. Category: Cryptographic & computational.
- What the verifier sees: model weights depends; inputs and outputs depends; training data not involved. Recomputation needs the weights and sampled requests inside the checking environment. For closed models, the record describes a trusted, confidential environment; disclosure to the verifier depends on that boundary.
- Filter note: May show model weights, depending on the design. Recomputation needs the weights and sampled requests inside the checking environment. For closed models, the record describes a trusted, confidential environment; disclosure to the verifier depends on that boundary.
- Filter note: May show inputs and outputs, depending on the design. Recomputation needs the weights and sampled requests inside the checking environment. For closed models, the record describes a trusted, confidential environment; disclosure to the verifier depends on that boundary.


## Properties

**Operational use**

- Sampled inference recomputation: Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for checking untrusted workers' activations against the declared model, prompt and precision

**Built for an adversarial prover**

- Sampled inference recomputation

**No new hardware needed**

- Safeguard attestation
- Sampled inference recomputation


## Attack testing

Attack testing records published testing for this use. It does not by itself show independent review, a formal proof or that a deployed system is secure.

**Testing history**

- Safeguard attestation: Analysis
- Sampled inference recomputation: Analysis


## Limits

**Open significant failures**

- Components outside the attested boundary (known failure, theoretical argument, in Safeguard attestation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/safeguard-attestation/evidence/flaws/4/) [1][2]. In the proof-of-guardrail experiments, the guardrail model and the agent's backend model were both reached through external APIs, and the authors leave the decision to trust those APIs to the verifier. The measured wrapper must also have no vulnerability that lets the unmeasured agent bypass the guardrail, for example by executing arbitrary commands inside the enclave. The code's README states that the enclave does not currently restrict the agent's arbitrary command execution, which could be used to bypass guardrails.
- Memory-bus interposition extracts attestation keys and forges attestations (known failure, demonstrated attack, in Safeguard attestation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/safeguard-attestation/evidence/flaws/5/) [1][4][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Inherited finding. Applies to variants using the affected Intel or AMD trust roots. PAL*M excludes physical attacks. A TDX-backed safeguard claim against a physical host attacker would be defeated, but these studies do not demonstrate a break of the AWS Nitro proof-of-guardrail prototype or of verifier-side recomputation. The TEE findings cover DDR5 attacks on Intel TDX, the H100 relay demonstration, DDR4 attacks on AMD SEV-SNP, and software-only SEV-SNP forgery before AMD's fixes. These are inherited hardware limits; a governance analysis explains why physical access matters in a treaty setting. Related finding: https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/tee-remote-attestation/evidence/flaws/1/.

  Response: Intel and AMD place the physical attack class outside their threat models, according to the researchers. AMD reports firmware fixes for RMPocalypse.

  Related mechanism: Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors (R1, not in the proposal). A tamper-protected enclosure around the chip is the proposed answer when the party that holds the hardware may attack it physically.
- Tolerance for numerical noise leaves a covert channel (known failure, demonstrated attack, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/evidence/flaws/1/) [14][22][25]. Schemes that accept approximate matches can put an upper bound on an adversary's covert bandwidth, but they cannot close the channel. The weight-exfiltration detector cut exfiltratable information to under 0.5%, not to zero, on a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model under benign prompt traffic. Its authors called the channel's size under adversarial prompts an open empirical question. An independent study showed that an adversary who controls the prompts roughly doubles the bits leaked per token. Across six models, that cut the slowdown from 146–254 times under benign prompts to 60–118 times. The attack widens the exfiltration bound. It does not target the check that outputs match the declared model.

  Related mechanism: Deterministic and bit-exact inference (R3, not in the proposal). Bit-exact inference would remove the numerical tolerance if exact replay can be deployed with the required weights and configuration.
- Some inference optimizations are not covered (known failure, theoretical argument, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/evidence/flaws/3/) [15][16]. TOPLOC's authors state that it cannot detect speculative decoding in which a cheaper model does the decoding. They did not test whether it distinguishes types of key-value (KV) cache compression. DiFR was evaluated only on sampling from a single model. Its authors sketch an extension to one speculative-decoding algorithm but do not test it.

**Open minor failures**

- Mixed hardware widens the honest baseline (known failure, open question, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/evidence/flaws/4/) [15]. When honest reference runs span different GPU types, the spread of benign scores grows. In DiFR's tests on Qwen3-30B-A3B, pooling A100 and H200 runs left Token-DiFR unable to separate the two smallest tested changes, a temperature of 1.1 instead of 1.0 and a simulated top-2 sampling bug, at the target false-positive rate, while cross-entropy separated them. Matched provider and verifier environments, or pooling that weights rare large deviations, restored detection.

**Scope limitations**

- Attestation shows a safeguard ran, not that it is effective (scope limitation, theoretical argument, in Safeguard attestation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/safeguard-attestation/evidence/flaws/1/) [1]. Proof of guardrail ensures that the guardrail executed, but the guardrail can still err or be jailbroken. Because the guardrail must be open source, a malicious developer can attack it with jailbreaks while still presenting a valid proof. In the authors' evaluation, Llama Guard 3 reached an F1 score of 0.56 on the unsafe class of the ToxicChat dataset. The authors state that proof of guardrail should not be interpreted or advertised as proof of safety.
- Selective attestation leaves traffic uncovered (scope limitation, theoretical argument, in Safeguard attestation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/safeguard-attestation/evidence/flaws/2/) [1][4][9]. Attestations are issued per response. In the prototype, the agent offers them when it receives high-stakes questions, so nothing shows that unattested traffic went through the same path. PAL*M's authors note that a prover could cherry-pick favourable executions, and suggest verifier-published nonces or requesting only session-level proofs. A governance analysis notes that auditors also need assurance that all activity is accounted for, since a host could start a second confidential virtual machine that bypasses monitoring.

  Related mechanism: On-chip telemetry from timing, memory and performance counters (R2, not in the proposal). On-chip counters are a proposed route to evidence about everything a chip runs, including a second virtual machine that skips the safeguard.
- Measurements may omit behaviour-relevant configuration or runtime changes (scope limitation, theoretical argument, in Safeguard attestation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/safeguard-attestation/evidence/flaws/3/) [9]. Every component that influences inference behaviour must be covered by the launch measurement, including feature flags, environment variables and invocation arguments. A launch measurement also does not show that a program keeps running as measured if the kernel is later compromised.
- Only recorded traffic is checked (scope limitation, theoretical argument, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/evidence/flaws/2/) [14][26]. Recomputation checks that recorded, declared workloads are correct. It cannot show that the record is complete. The published schemes do not cover hidden workloads run on the same compute, or substituted work. Rinberg et al. say their exfiltration-detection scheme cannot stand alone.

  Related mechanism: Network taps and certifiers (R1, not in the proposal). Taps copy and hash all traffic on the monitored links, which bears on whether the traffic record is complete. They do not show what else ran on the same chips.


## Possible additions

Mechanisms on the map, not in the proposal, that the records connect to an unaddressed or partly addressed claim, an open failure or a dependency. Pointers, not recommendations: each brings its own readiness level and findings, and none is claimed to close a failure.

- **Deterministic and bit-exact inference** (Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for reproducing open-model inference from receipts in Gensyn's information-market service)
  - Bears on the open significant failure "Tolerance for numerical noise leaves a covert channel" in Sampled inference recomputation. Bit-exact inference would remove the numerical tolerance if exact replay can be deployed with the required weights and configuration.
- **Hardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors** (Proposed (legacy code R1), assessed for checking and enforcing training-compute limits on chips, against adversaries up to states)
  - Bears on the open significant failure "Memory-bus interposition extracts attestation keys and forges attestations" in Safeguard attestation. A tamper-protected enclosure around the chip is the proposed answer when the party that holds the hardware may attack it physically.
- **Hardware-attested weight binding** (Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for hardware-attested weight binding showing users that a service runs its committed weights)
  - Safeguard attestation waits on it: Safeguard evidence must be bound to the model actually served, which depends on model-identity attestation.
- **TEE remote attestation for AI workloads** (Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for showing which software ran to a party that distrusts the operator holding the hardware)
  - Safeguard attestation waits on it: Frontier model inference typically needs several GPUs, GPU confidential computing is less mature than CPU support, and CPU inference, which an enclave prototype had to use, ran about 100 times slower than GPU inference.
  - Safeguard attestation waits on it: Trust rests on a small number of hardware vendors, and a per-CPU Intel attestation key has been extracted by physical attack.
- **Network taps and certifiers** (Proposed (legacy code R1), assessed for committing a complete record of cluster traffic, so declared inference can be checked)
  - Sampled inference recomputation waits on it: In tap-based retrofit designs, recording all inference traffic needs network taps and recomputation servers that can ingest it, in the worst case one recomputation-server network interface per inference front-end interface.


## Dependencies

**Missing prerequisites**

- TEE remote attestation for AI workloads (Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for showing which software ran to a party that distrusts the operator holding the hardware), needed by Safeguard attestation
- Hardware-attested weight binding (Operational use (legacy code R3), assessed for hardware-attested weight binding showing users that a service runs its committed weights), needed by Safeguard attestation

**Blockers**

- Safeguard attestation: No published design shows that all of a provider's traffic passes through the attested safeguard path; current evidence covers individual attested responses. (coverage & hidden compute) [1][9]
- Safeguard attestation: Frontier model inference typically needs several GPUs, GPU confidential computing is less mature than CPU support, and CPU inference, which an enclave prototype had to use, ran about 100 times slower than GPU inference. (performance & compatibility; waits on TEE remote attestation for AI workloads) [9][27]
- Safeguard attestation: Trust rests on a small number of hardware vendors, and a per-CPU Intel attestation key has been extracted by physical attack. (hardware trust; waits on TEE remote attestation for AI workloads) [7][9]
- Safeguard attestation: Safeguard evidence must be bound to the model actually served, which depends on model-identity attestation. (evidence binding; waits on Hardware-attested weight binding) [27][28]
- Safeguard attestation: No independent red-team or audit of a safeguard-attestation system has been published, and the available prototypes are described by their authors as proofs of concept that have not been stress-tested by a counterparty. (adversarial validation) [2][6]
- Sampled inference recomputation: In tap-based retrofit designs, recording all inference traffic needs network taps and recomputation servers that can ingest it, in the worst case one recomputation-server network interface per inference front-end interface. (coverage & hidden compute; waits on Network taps and certifiers) [21][29]
- Sampled inference recomputation: In retrofit designs, the recomputation server must sit inside the prover's data centre, possibly under the prover's physical control, and still be protected from a compromised provider, which Amodo rates 'not on track'. (hardware trust) [14][21]
- Sampled inference recomputation: No independent red-team of a recomputation consistency check has been published (the one independent attack study targets the weight-exfiltration bound), and Amodo rates recomputation red-teaming 'not started'. (adversarial validation) [21][22]
- Sampled inference recomputation: Tolerance-based checks need calibration on trusted hardware and exact knowledge of the provider's sampling procedure, and in one prototype a sampling-implementation mismatch produced large spurious differences. (performance & compatibility) [15][20]
- Sampled inference recomputation: The verifier needs the model weights, so checking a closed-weights model requires a trusted, confidential recomputation environment, which the retrofit designs place inside the prover's facility. (privacy & leakage) [13][15][26]


## What the verifier sees

- Model weights: shown by none; depends on the design for Safeguard attestation and Sampled inference recomputation; hidden by none; not involved in none; unspecified for none.
- Inputs and outputs: shown by none; depends on the design for Safeguard attestation and Sampled inference recomputation; hidden by none; not involved in none; unspecified for none.
- Training data: shown by none; depends on the design for none; hidden by none; not involved in Safeguard attestation and Sampled inference recomputation; unspecified for none.

## Implementations

- Safeguard attestation: none on the map
- Sampled inference recomputation: [AI 2040 inference-only verification stack](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ai-2040-inference-only-verification-plan/) (R1, proposed architecture); [DiFR (Divergence From Reference)](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/difr/) (R2, research prototype); [Low-trust AI compute verification system overview](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/low-trust-compute-verification-system-overview/) (R1, proposed architecture); [SASH confidential network logger](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/sash-confidential-network-logger/) (R1, research prototype); [TOPLOC](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/toploc/) (R3, open-source project)

## Sources

1. Proof-of-Guardrail in AI Agents and What (Not) to Trust from It, X. Jin et al. (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05786
2. Verifiable-ClawGuard: proof-of-guardrail reference code, SaharaLabsAI (2026). https://github.com/SaharaLabsAI/Verifiable-ClawGuard
3. Safety Without Compromising on Privacy, D. McCann-Sayles et al. (2026). https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2026-09-14-safety-without-compromising-privacy
4. PAL*M: Property Attestation for Large Generative Models, P. Chantasantitam et al. (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16199
5. Enabling Verifiably-Scoped Monitoring through Large Language Models and Trusted Compute, B. Penchas et al. (2026). https://icml.cc/virtual/2026/78630
6. Auditor-in-a-Box: Tools for Third-Party Auditing, R. Rinberg & B. Penchas (2026). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uWYk7MM9hAf9GEbGe/auditor-in-a-box-tools-for-third-party-auditing
7. TEE.fail: Breaking Trusted Execution Environments via DDR5 Memory Bus Interposition, J. Chuang et al. (2026). https://tee.fail/
8. DDRop: Active Memory Interposer Attacks on Confidential VMs by Dropping DDR5 Writes, J. De Meulemeester et al. (2026). https://ddropattack.eu/
9. On TEEs for Privacy-Preserving Monitoring in AI Governance, Gloria Z (2026). https://techgov.intelligence.org/blog/on-tees-for-privacy-preserving-monitoring-in-ai-governance
10. Battering RAM: Low-Cost Interposer Attacks on Confidential Computing via Dynamic Memory Aliasing, J. De Meulemeester et al. (2026). https://batteringram.eu/
11. RMPocalypse: How a Catch-22 Breaks AMD SEV-SNP, B. Schlüter & S. Shinde (2025). https://rmpocalypse.github.io/
12. SEV-SNP RMP Initialization Vulnerability (AMD-SB-3020), AMD (2025). https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-3020.html
13. A System Overview for Near-Term, Low-Trust AI Compute Verification, N. Cankaya (2026). https://intelligence.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/A-system-overview-for-near-term-low-trust-AI-compute-verification.pdf
14. Verifying LLM Inference to Detect Model Weight Exfiltration, R. Rinberg et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02620
15. DiFR: Inference Verification Despite Nondeterminism, A. Karvonen et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20621
16. TOPLOC: A Locality Sensitive Hashing Scheme for Trustless Verifiable Inference, J. M. Ong et al. (2025). https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/ong25a.html
17. PrimeIntellect-ai/toploc (GitHub repository), Prime Intellect (2025). https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/toploc
18. INTELLECT-2: A Reasoning Model Trained Through Globally Decentralized Reinforcement Learning, Prime Intellect Team et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07291
19. adamkarvonen/difr (GitHub repository), A. Karvonen (2025). https://github.com/adamkarvonen/difr
20. Scaling Recomputation Inference Verification, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-09-02-scaling-recomputation-inference-verification/
21. AI 2040 Plan A — Verification SITREP, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/ai-verification/plan-a-sitrep/
22. Adversarial Entropy Inflation Against Gumbel-Based Inference Verification, N. Kezins (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23375
23. SYNTHETIC-2 Release: Four Million Collaboratively Generated Reasoning Traces, Prime Intellect (2025). https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/synthetic-2-release
24. An Inference Verification Prototype — Stage 1, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-06-29-inference-verification-prototype/
25. Bit-Exact AI Inference Verification Without Performance Tradeoffs, N. Cankaya (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00279
26. Example Schemes for Verifying High-Stakes AI Agreements, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-06-23-verification-algorithms/
27. Attestable Audits: Verifiable AI Safety Benchmarks Using Trusted Execution Environments, C. Schnabl et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23706
28. How Tinfoil Proves Exactly What Model Is Running, Tinfoil Team (2026). https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2026-02-03-proving-model-identity
29. Verification Plan, R. Dean (2026). https://ai-2040.com/supplements/verification-plan