Not every audit requires an executable verifier. When a claim can be independently reconstructed from public artifacts, the verifier turns the evidence chain into an executable check rather than an automated truth machine. The same bounded logic also applies when the decisive work is source tracing, construct analysis, metric decomposition, or claim lineage.
M0 machine candidate · M1 source located · V2 independently verified · V3 reproduced · V4 consequence verified.
Cosmetic only → technical defect → reproducibility impaired → specific result affected → explicit published claim affected → core substantive conclusion affected.
Fingerprint the input artifact and independently recompute the focal consequence from row-level or draw-level data.
Move farther upstream: reconstruct matrices, transformations, solves, or other model-specific intermediate objects and compare downstream output.
Pin the exact archived source with hashes and anchors, then disclose the provenance path required to regenerate compact audit artifacts.
AI may assist retrieval, document comparison, code-smell detection, dependency tracing, and procedure drafting. A public finding requires source-level or executable verification.
Construct validity, mechanism, theory–evidence fit, alternative explanations, substantive interpretation, fairness, and the boundary of what follows are not collapsed into a single automated score.