# 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-0022,M-0001&implementations=M-0022:I-0011

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 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities / AI 2040 inference-only verification stack | R1 | Adversarial | None | Retrofit device | 0 / 3 / 0 | unspecified | unspecified | unspecified |
| Sampled inference recomputation | R3 | Adversarial | Analysis | None | 0 / 3 / 1 | depends | depends | not involved |

## Claims

No claims chosen.

## Mechanisms

### Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

A proposed retrofit that isolates data-centre inference units, taps their front-end traffic and recomputes random samples to check that only declared inference runs. ([Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities](https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/side-channel-suppression/))

- Assessment: selected implementation [AI 2040 inference-only verification stack](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ai-2040-inference-only-verification-plan/).
- Readiness: R1 Proposed, assessed for showing that retrofitted data centres run only inference.
- Claims in this proposal: none of them.
- Threat model: adversarial prover. Hardware: retrofit device. Prover cooperation: required. Attack testing: none. Category: Isolation & system architectures.
- 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.

### 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.
- Readiness: R3 In production, assessed for checking untrusted workers' activations against the declared model, prompt and precision.
- 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.


## Properties

**In production**

- Sampled inference recomputation: R3 In production, assessed for checking untrusted workers' activations against the declared model, prompt and precision

**Built for an adversarial prover**

- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities
- Sampled inference recomputation

**No new hardware needed**

- Sampled inference recomputation


## 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**

- Sampled inference recomputation: Analysis


## Limits

**Open significant flaws**

- The recomputation server must be trusted (theoretical argument, in AI 2040 inference-only verification stack; https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ai-2040-inference-only-verification-plan/#flaw-1) [1][2][4]. The plan calls the integrity of the recomputation server an extremely important aspect, and its argument that sampling verifies all outputs assumes that the server's computations and outputs can be trusted. The companion page notes that the server sits inside the prover's facility, possibly under the prover's physical control, and that hardening it against integrity attacks needs significant research. Amodo rates recomputation-server security as not on track.
- Spare compute is not verified (theoretical argument, in AI 2040 inference-only verification stack; https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ai-2040-inference-only-verification-plan/#flaw-2) [1]. The plan states that it does not verify that spare compute is unused for unapproved workloads, because this seems very challenging. It relies instead on side-channel bounds and memory wipes, so that the only results that persist are verified inference outputs.
- A recomputation family degrades against prompt-controlling adversaries (demonstrated attack, in AI 2040 inference-only verification stack; https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ai-2040-inference-only-verification-plan/#flaw-3) [1][2][6][7]. The plan's companion page names DiFR among the recomputation schemes being tested. An independent study found that Gumbel-based inference verification, the family that includes Token-DiFR, leaks roughly twice as many bits per token when the adversary chooses prompts that disrupt the text's structure, across six models of 1 to 32 billion parameters. The slowdown it imposes on a hidden-signalling adversary falls from 146–254 times under benign prompts to 60–118 times. The attack weakens the bound on hidden information in outputs, which the plan relies on to keep undeclared results from leaving.
- Tolerance for numerical noise leaves a covert channel (demonstrated attack, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/#flaw-1) [6][7][17]. 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.
- Only recorded traffic is checked (theoretical argument, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/#flaw-2) [6][18]. 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.
- Some inference optimizations are not covered (theoretical argument, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/#flaw-3) [9][10]. 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.

**Family finding context**

- Context for AI 2040 inference-only verification stack; applicability depends on the finding's scope. Supply-chain implants may evade inspection (theoretical argument, in Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/side-channel-suppression/#flaw-1) [8]. Cankaya identifies malicious hardware embedded deep in purchased components as a residual risk that visual inspection and disassembly may not catch. He notes that radiographic examination under high-security standards could mitigate it.
- Context for AI 2040 inference-only verification stack; applicability depends on the finding's scope. Openings for airflow, power and optics weaken shielding (theoretical argument, in Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/side-channel-suppression/#flaw-2) [8]. Cankaya notes that keeping attenuation high while passing high-power airflow, cabling and optical links adds complexity beyond existing shielded-enclosure specifications.
- Context for AI 2040 inference-only verification stack; applicability depends on the finding's scope. Inspection assumptions may not hold (open question, in Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/side-channel-suppression/#flaw-3) [8]. The design's statistical argument assumes that visual or disassembly inspection catches every flaw that is present in a sampled unit. Cankaya is unsure whether destructive teardowns are defence-dominant or offence-dominant.

**Open minor flaws**

- Mixed hardware widens the honest baseline (open question, in Sampled inference recomputation; https://trustbutveri.fyi/mechanisms/sampled-inference-recomputation/#flaw-4) [9]. 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.

**Not yet demonstrated**

- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: R1 Proposed, assessed for showing that retrofitted data centres run only inference


## 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.

- **Deterministic and bit-exact inference** (R3 In production, assessed for reproducing open-model inference from receipts in Gensyn's information-market service)
  - Bears on the open significant flaw "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.
- **Network taps and certifiers** (R1 Proposed, assessed for committing a complete record of cluster traffic, so declared inference can be checked)
  - Bears on the open significant flaw "Only recorded traffic is checked" in Sampled inference recomputation. 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.
  - Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it: Passive optical taps work at 400G, but the 800G and 1600G line rates now arriving in data centres are undemonstrated.
  - 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.
- **Tamper evidence for verifier devices** (R2 Demonstrated, assessed for detecting probing of proposed verifier hardware, using server and electronics prototypes as evidence)
  - Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it: Checking that taps are correctly installed and stay in place at scale is not a solved problem, and hardening the recomputation server inside the prover's facility needs significant research.
- **Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure** (R1 Proposed, assessed for showing that no data from earlier work persists in memory the wipe reaches)
  - Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it: Memory wiping may use existing algorithms, but hardware testing is at an early stage.
- **Whole-workload recomputation (reproducible packets)** (R1 Proposed, assessed for recomputing whole workloads to show a cluster runs only declared inference)
  - Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities waits on it: A fully reproducible inference stack needs substantial software and tooling, and per-packet network reproducibility may need considerable software, firmware and possibly hardware work.


## Dependencies

**Missing prerequisites**

- Whole-workload recomputation (reproducible packets) (R1 Proposed, assessed for recomputing whole workloads to show a cluster runs only declared inference), needed by Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities

**Shared foundations**

- Network taps and certifiers, relied on by Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities and Sampled inference recomputation

**Blockers**

- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: A fully reproducible inference stack needs substantial software and tooling, and per-packet network reproducibility may need considerable software, firmware and possibly hardware work. (performance & compatibility; waits on Whole-workload recomputation (reproducible packets)) [2]
- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: Passive optical taps work at 400G, but the 800G and 1600G line rates now arriving in data centres are undemonstrated. (performance & compatibility; waits on Network taps and certifiers) [2]
- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: Checking that taps are correctly installed and stay in place at scale is not a solved problem, and hardening the recomputation server inside the prover's facility needs significant research. (hardware trust; waits on Tamper evidence for verifier devices) [2][4]
- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: There is no plan yet for quickly scaling side-channel defences on a frontier cluster; only early theoretical pieces exist. (coverage & hidden compute; waits on Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities) [2]
- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: Memory wiping may use existing algorithms, but hardware testing is at an early stage. (coverage & hidden compute; waits on Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure) [2]
- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: Robust red-teaming of recomputation schemes has not started, and most algorithm development remains academic. (adversarial validation) [2][4]
- 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) [1][4]
- 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) [4][6]
- 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) [4][7]
- 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) [9][14]
- 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) [9][18][19]


## What the verifier sees

- Model weights: shown by none; depends on the design for Sampled inference recomputation; hidden by none; not involved in none; unspecified for Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities.
- Inputs and outputs: shown by none; depends on the design for Sampled inference recomputation; hidden by none; not involved in none; unspecified for Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities.
- Training data: shown by none; depends on the design for none; hidden by none; not involved in Sampled inference recomputation; unspecified for Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities.

## Implementations

- Side-channel suppression for isolated facilities: [AI 2040 inference-only verification stack](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/ai-2040-inference-only-verification-plan/) (R1, proposed architecture); [Low-trust AI compute verification system overview](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/low-trust-compute-verification-system-overview/) (R1, proposed architecture); [RAND secure inference data center (SIDC) design](https://trustbutveri.fyi/implementations/rand-secure-inference-data-centers/) (R1, proposed architecture)
- 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. Verification Plan, R. Dean (2026). https://ai-2040.com/supplements/verification-plan
2. Get Involved in Verification, AI Futures Project (2026). https://ai-2040.com/supplements/verification-plan/get-involved
3. Verifying international AI deals: Plan A, the state-of-play, and what you can do to help, T. Milton et al. (2026). https://amodo.substack.com/p/verifying-international-ai-deals
4. AI 2040 Plan A — Verification SITREP, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/ai-verification/plan-a-sitrep/
5. Fitting a Network TAP to our Inference Verification Prototype, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-09-15-network-tap-inference-verification/
6. Verifying LLM Inference to Detect Model Weight Exfiltration, R. Rinberg et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02620
7. Adversarial Entropy Inflation Against Gumbel-Based Inference Verification, N. Kezins (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23375
8. Suppressing Side Channels in an Untrusted Data Center via Retrofitted Defenses, N. Cankaya (2026). https://techgov.intelligence.org/blog/suppressing-side-channels-in-an-untrusted-data-center-via-retrofitted-defenses
9. DiFR: Inference Verification Despite Nondeterminism, A. Karvonen et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20621
10. TOPLOC: A Locality Sensitive Hashing Scheme for Trustless Verifiable Inference, J. M. Ong et al. (2025). https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/ong25a.html
11. PrimeIntellect-ai/toploc (GitHub repository), Prime Intellect (2025). https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/toploc
12. INTELLECT-2: A Reasoning Model Trained Through Globally Decentralized Reinforcement Learning, Prime Intellect Team et al. (2025). https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07291
13. adamkarvonen/difr (GitHub repository), A. Karvonen (2025). https://github.com/adamkarvonen/difr
14. Scaling Recomputation Inference Verification, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-09-02-scaling-recomputation-inference-verification/
15. SYNTHETIC-2 Release: Four Million Collaboratively Generated Reasoning Traces, Prime Intellect (2025). https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/synthetic-2-release
16. An Inference Verification Prototype — Stage 1, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-06-29-inference-verification-prototype/
17. Bit-Exact AI Inference Verification Without Performance Tradeoffs, N. Cankaya (2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00279
18. Example Schemes for Verifying High-Stakes AI Agreements, Amodo Design (2026). https://amododesign.com/notes/2026-06-23-verification-algorithms/
19. 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