AI with Authority, from Application to Silicon
arXiv:2608.21356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For sixty years, machine verification has been a major cost overhead, affordable only for exceptional artifacts. Here we report that generative AI in...
arXiv:2607. 14340v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents produce code faster than humans can review it.
arXiv:2608.21356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For sixty years, machine verification has been a major cost overhead, affordable only for exceptional artifacts. Here we report that generative AI in...
arXiv:2606. 23768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose cryptographic certificates of validity for agentic AI systems.
FormalFlow is a system that coordinates AI proving agents under human supervision to tackle long‑horizon formalizations, using a shared blueprint for nested planning, proving, and review loops. The team used it to produce a machine‑checked Lean 4 proof of the quantum soundness of the classical low‑individual‑degree test, a core theorem underlying MIP* = RE, in 63 days. The resulting library contains 126,367 lines of Lean code, all generated by agents, and corrects side conditions while preserving the published error bound under corrected assumptions.
The paper presents a method for turning expert diagnoses of verification failures into reusable guidance for coding agents. By combining executable language definitions in the K framework with a set of procedures for constructing specifications, repairing proofs, and auditing their adequacy, the authors achieve a 164/164 success rate on the HumanEval benchmark after two targeted repairs. They further demonstrate that audits can detect defects missed by successful proofs and evaluate the approach on KleverBench and Optimism proofs, highlighting both progress and remaining challenges.
Formal verification offers the strongest guarantee of software correctness, but it does not scale: the proofs demanded by interactive theorem provers such as Coq require enormous expert effort. Large language models (LLMs) promise to generate these proofs automatically, yet existing approaches wire a fixed, human-designed proof strategy into the system and constrain the model to follow it (retrieving premises and predicting tactics one step at a time, or splitting goals by divide-and-conquer), and still prove only a fraction of their target theorems.
The paper introduces Runtime Assurance Contracts (RAC) as a formal policy framework for high‑risk AI agents, addressing the "assurance‑transition gap" by binding autonomy boundaries, component eligibility, evidence state, transition policy, human‑review capacity, and non‑compensatory gates. RAC allows soft metrics to influence routing while mandating retries, switches, escalations, deferrals, or stops when mandatory gates fail or are unknown, ensuring aggregate performance cannot alone authorize action. The authors define the contract, evidence record, permission rule, and five invariants, and evaluate RAC through deterministic failure‑injection studies, hand‑authored traces, and a prospective synthetic holdout, comparing it to score‑only and restricted protocol baselines.
arXiv:2607. 06341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Formal verification offers the strongest guarantee of software correctness, but it does not scale: the proofs demanded by interactive theorem provers such as Coq require enormous expert effort.
arXiv:2608. 13522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are increasingly used for programming, but do not provide any guarantee on the correctness of generated code.
The paper investigates the reliability of software produced by agentic AI by comparing AI-generated versions of ten well-known Linux utilities to their human-written counterparts. Using fuzz testing (both black-box and coverage-guided AFL++), the authors find that AI-generated code is often as reliable or more reliable than the latest human versions, with fewer memory errors but a higher incidence of hangs. The study emphasizes that robust AI-generated software requires careful prompting, skilled human oversight, and that the AI workflow can serve as a cost-effective specification for sustainable code.
arXiv:2607. 01223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When should an AI system's answer be trusted?
arXiv:2511. 06701v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Scientist systems risk manufacturing spurious discoveries through uncontrolled multiple testing.
arXiv:2603. 05786v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI agents become widely deployed as online services, users often rely on an agent developer's claim about how safety is enforced, which introduces a threat where safety measures are falsely advertised.