# AI verification proposal

A proposal built with the Proposal Explorer of the AI Verification Tech Map (https://trustbutveri.fyi/), from its records of 2026-10-08. Interactive version: https://trustbutveri.fyi/explorer/?mechanisms=M-0004,M-0002&implementations=M-0004:I-0005

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 readiness and open flaws. Readiness levels R0 to R4 describe one record's public evidence for its assessed use and are never combined. Definitions: https://trustbutveri.fyi/about/methodology/ (roles, properties and flaws) and https://trustbutveri.fyi/about/readiness/ (readiness levels).

## Filters

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

None set. Every mechanism on the map was available.

## Overview

One row per mechanism, read from its record. Open flaws: critical / significant / minor. The last three columns are the editors' reading of what the verifier sees.

| Mechanism | Readiness | Prover | Attack testing | Hardware | Open flaws | Weights | Inputs and outputs | Training data |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Zero-knowledge proofs of inference / Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover | R1 | Adversarial | None | None | 0 / 2 / 0 | unspecified | unspecified | unspecified |
| Deterministic and bit-exact inference | R3 | Adversarial | Analysis | None | 0 / 1 / 1 | depends | depends | not involved |

## Claims

No claims chosen.

## Mechanisms

### Zero-knowledge proofs of inference

Attestable's zero-knowledge prover, which the company reports proves large language model outputs came from committed weights at tens of tokens per second. ([Zero-knowledge proofs of inference](https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/zk-proofs-of-inference/))

- Assessment: selected implementation [Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/attestable-zk-inference/).
- Readiness: R1 Proposed, assessed for proving an output came from committed weights.
- Claims in this proposal: none of them.
- Threat model: adversarial prover. Hardware: none. Prover cooperation: required. Attack testing: none. Category: Cryptographic & computational.
- What the verifier sees: model weights unspecified; inputs and outputs unspecified; training data unspecified. This Explorer has no asset-specific exposure assessment for this implementation. Check its source and deployment assumptions.

### Deterministic and bit-exact inference

Making model inference reproducible bit for bit, so that a verifier's re-run must match the provider's output exactly rather than approximately. ([Deterministic and bit-exact inference](https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/deterministic-inference/))

- Assessment: mechanism family.
- Readiness: R3 In production, assessed for reproducing open-model inference from receipts in Gensyn's information-market service.
- 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. Exact replay needs the weights, configuration and replayed requests inside the recomputation environment. What the verifier sees depends on whether that environment keeps them confidential.


## Properties

**In production**

- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: R3 In production, assessed for reproducing open-model inference from receipts in Gensyn's information-market service

**Built for an adversarial prover**

- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference

**No new hardware needed**

- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference


## Attack testing

Published attempts to break a system, including those that found failures. Testing history does not establish that open flaws are resolved.

**Testing history**

- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: Analysis


## Limits

**Open significant flaws**

- Proves an 8-bit quantised variant of the model (open question, in Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover; https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/attestable-zk-inference/#flaw-1) [1]. Attestable reports that matrix multiplications are dynamically quantised to 8-bit integers, while non-linear operations are proven in floating point. It reports that its IFEval result "shows where the current quantization still needs improvement". The proven model is therefore a quantised variant, which a verifier must accept as the declared model.
- A proof covers only the computation it is about (theoretical argument, in Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover; https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/attestable-zk-inference/#flaw-2) [2]. Attestable states that "a proof of some computation is not a proof of all computation" and that a proof "cannot discover a datacenter that was never declared".
- Cross-hardware replay relies on reverse-engineered, closed behaviour (open question, in Deterministic and bit-exact inference; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/deterministic-inference/#flaw-2) [9][11]. Emulating one GPU's rounding on another requires reverse-engineering tensor-core arithmetic and modelling proprietary kernel choices. Hawkeye covers a subset of NVIDIA architectures and states that attention and other higher-level operations need further reverse engineering. For the bit-exact emulator, a proprietary Hopper kernel family is an open edge case.

**Family finding context**

- Context for Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover; applicability depends on the finding's scope. The proof covers a fixed-point approximation, not the floating-point model (open question, in Zero-knowledge proofs of inference; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/zk-proofs-of-inference/#flaw-1) [1][4][5][6]. Current ZK inference systems prove a quantised version of the network. zkLLM scales values by 2^16 and reports small perplexity changes. Attestable reports quantising matrix multiplications to 8-bit integers while proving other operations in floating point. A verifier therefore learns about the proof-friendly variant, and must separately accept that this variant is the declared model. Trail of Bits built a ResNet-18 backdoor that is dormant in the full-precision model and active after ezkl's quantisation; whether it persists through proving was left for further investigation. A verification system design calls floating-point emulation in ZKPs an open problem.
- Context for Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover; applicability depends on the finding's scope. A proof speaks only for the computations that were proven (theoretical argument, in Zero-knowledge proofs of inference; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/zk-proofs-of-inference/#flaw-2) [2]. Attestable writes that "a proof of some computation is not a proof of all computation", and that a proof cannot discover a datacenter that was never declared. Proofs of inference do not by themselves show that no other workload ran on the same or other hardware.

  Related mechanism: Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting (R1, not in the proposal). The record names proof-of-work accounting as the kind of compute accounting needed to show that proven inference was the only work done.
- Context for Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover; applicability depends on the finding's scope. The model architecture is disclosed (theoretical argument, in Zero-knowledge proofs of inference; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/zk-proofs-of-inference/#flaw-3) [4][7]. ZKML "requires that the model architecture (but not weights) is revealed", and zkLLM assumes a publicly known model structure. Architecture can be commercially sensitive.
- Context for Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover; applicability depends on the finding's scope. Proofs do not bind computational effort (Hollow-LLM) (demonstrated attack, in Zero-knowledge proofs of inference; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/zk-proofs-of-inference/#flaw-4) [8]. Researchers at the University of Southern California show that a proof of inference certifies that an output is consistent with committed weights under the declared architecture, but not how much computation produced it. In their Hollow-LLM attack, a provider keeps the declared architecture and parameter count but commits to "ghost weights". Some layers pass their inputs through unchanged, and wide layers carry the signal in a small subspace, so a much smaller inner model does the real work. The ghost weights satisfy the verification circuit and yield valid proofs.

  The authors ran the attack with the proof procedure of zkGPT, a separate ZK inference system, on a 6-layer, 512-dimensional transformer declared as up to 12 layers and 1,024 dimensions. Outputs were identical to the inner model's, and serving cost stayed at the inner model's level. An honest model of the declared size cost 2.4 times as much to prefill and 3.1 times as much to decode. Proving cost still grew with the declared architecture.

  The authors note that results may be served before any proof, with the provider building the witness only when a call is selected for audit. They describe their constructions as "compatible with state-of-the-art zkLLM pipelines", and state that the attack does not imply a flaw in the proof system itself. They propose challenge-based audits and ablation tests, which raise the cost of cheating but give no guarantee.

**Open minor flaws**

- Some kernels remain genuinely nondeterministic (open question, in Deterministic and bit-exact inference; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/deterministic-inference/#flaw-1) [9]. The bit-exact work separates kernels that are deterministic but not batch-invariant from truly nondeterministic ones that use atomic functions. Some integer de-quantization kernels use atomic additions and remain nondeterministic, so exact replay needs backends that avoid them.

**Not yet demonstrated**

- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference: R1 Proposed, assessed for proving an output came from committed weights


## Possible additions

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

- **Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting** (R1 Proposed, assessed for bounding the spare capacity of declared hardware that could run training)
  - Zero-knowledge proofs of inference waits on it: Covering computation that is not proven relies on proof-of-work accounting, which Attestable has only proposed.


## Dependencies

**Blockers**

- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference: No paper, protocol specification or code is public, so the reported results cannot be reproduced. (adversarial validation) [1]
- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference: Attestable reports a context window limited to 16K tokens. (performance & compatibility) [1]
- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference: Covering computation that is not proven relies on proof-of-work accounting, which Attestable has only proposed. (coverage & hidden compute; waits on Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting) [2]
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: Batch-invariant kernels cost throughput: in Thinking Machines' Qwen3-8B test, an improved deterministic build took 42 s against 26 s for vLLM's default, and SGLang reports an average 34.35% slowdown on its FlashInfer and FlashAttention 3 backends. (performance & compatibility) [10][12]
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: Coverage is incomplete: the bit-exact emulator targets dense blocks on NVIDIA GPUs and excludes mixture-of-experts inference and training, and vLLM's batch-invariant mode is in beta, with open work on AMD hardware and speculative decoding. (performance & compatibility) [9][13][19]
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: Amodo's status page for the AI 2040 verification plan rates a reproducible inference stack for that plan as 'not started'. (performance & compatibility) [20]
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: Exact replay requires the prover to disclose weights, software versions, parallelism and batch sizes to whoever recomputes. (privacy & leakage) [6][9]


## What the verifier sees

- Model weights: shown by none; depends on the design for Deterministic and bit-exact inference; hidden by none; not involved in none; unspecified for Zero-knowledge proofs of inference.
- Inputs and outputs: shown by none; depends on the design for Deterministic and bit-exact inference; hidden by none; not involved in none; unspecified for Zero-knowledge proofs of inference.
- Training data: shown by none; depends on the design for none; hidden by none; not involved in Deterministic and bit-exact inference; unspecified for Zero-knowledge proofs of inference.

## Implementations

- Zero-knowledge proofs of inference: [Attestable zero-knowledge inference prover](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/attestable-zk-inference/) (R1, product); [EZKL](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ezkl/) (R2, product); [Low-trust AI compute verification system overview](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/low-trust-compute-verification-system-overview/) (R1, proposed architecture); [zkLLM](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/zkllm/) (R2, research prototype)
- Deterministic and bit-exact inference: [Batch-invariant inference kernels (Thinking Machines)](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/batch-invariant-inference-kernels/) (R2, open-source project); [Verde and RepOps (Gensyn)](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/gensyn-verde-repops/) (R3, product); [Low-trust AI compute verification system overview](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/low-trust-compute-verification-system-overview/) (R1, proposed architecture)

## Sources

1. Proving LLMs at Scale, Attestable (2026). https://attestable.com/blog/proving-llms-scale
2. Pacing AI Requires Proof, Attestable (2026). https://attestable.com/blog/pacing-ai-requires-proof
3. From Verifiability to Model-Weight Security, Attestable (2026). https://attestable.com/blog/model-weights-security
4. zkLLM: Zero Knowledge Proofs for Large Language Models, H. Sun et al. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3670334
5. Zkonduit EZKL Security Assessment, F. Casal et al. (2025). https://github.com/trailofbits/publications/blob/master/reviews/2025-03-zkonduit-ezkl-securityreview.pdf
6. 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
7. ZKML: An Optimizing System for ML Inference in Zero-Knowledge Proofs, B.-J. Chen et al. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1145/3627703.3650088
8. Hollow-LLM Attack: Computationally Trivial Weights in Zero-Knowledge Verification of LLM Inference, C. Gong et al. (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28884
9. Bit-Exact AI Inference Verification Without Performance Tradeoffs, N. Cankaya (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00279
10. Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference, H. He & Thinking Machines Lab (2025). https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in-llm-inference/
11. Hawkeye: Reproducing GPU-Level Non-Determinism, E. Badash et al. (2026). https://proceedings.mlsys.org/paper_files/paper/2026/hash/e217c271a57c365a246b0ad39e668ba8-Abstract-Conference.html
12. Towards Deterministic Inference in SGLang and Reproducible RL Training, The SGLang Team (2025). https://www.lmsys.org/blog/2025-09-22-sglang-deterministic/
13. Batch Invariance (vLLM documentation), vLLM project (2026). https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/blob/main/docs/features/batch_invariance.md
14. gensyn-ai/ree: Gensyn Reproducible Execution Environment (GitHub repository), Gensyn (2026). https://github.com/gensyn-ai/ree
15. EigenCloud Brings Verifiable AI to Mass Market with EigenAI and EigenCompute Launches, EigenCloud (2025). https://www.eigenlabs.org/blog/eigencloud-brings-verifiable-ai-to-mass-market-with-eigenai-and-eigencompute-launches/
16. Building Delphi: Pricing, Settlement, and Agentic Trading, D. Jedamski (2026). https://www.gensyn.ai/blog/building-delphi-pricing-settlement-and-agentic-trading
17. Reproducible Execution Environment (REE) (Gensyn documentation), Gensyn (2026). https://docs.gensyn.ai/tech
18. What is Delphi? (Delphi documentation), Gensyn (2026). https://docs.delphi.fyi/
19. [Feature]: Batch Invariant Feature and Performance Optimization (vLLM issue #27433), vLLM project contributors (2025). https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/27433
20. AI 2040 Plan A — Verification SITREP, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/ai-verification/plan-a-sitrep/