Verification does not check that mined matrices come from AI workloads

Miners choose their own matrices ⁵. Basu reports that Pearl's verification "does not check whether the matrices originate from an AI model", that random matrices pass it, and that Pearl's reference mining code generates uniformly random matrices, with vLLM inference as an option. String analysis suggests that the dominant third-party mining software contains no inference code. Basu also finds that a naive fixed-threshold check of matrix kurtosis is defeated, at negligible cost, by sampling clipped Gaussian matrices. Basu calls the gap "a design property" rather than a vulnerability ⁶. It does not affect the claim that work was performed, but it means the "useful" part of the work is not verified.