ClaimReceipt: Verifying Evidence Sufficiency and Coverage in Agent Evaluations

Abstract:Agent evaluations face two distinct evidentiary questions: whether a reported claim is recomputable from retained evidence (sufficiency), and whether the retained records cover the committed experiment set (coverage). Generic logs and hash-linked transcripts answer neither reliably. We introduce ClaimReceipt, a claim-relative receipt specification and selective verifier that binds typed transaction evidence to a signed experiment manifest and returns PASS, INVALID, or INCONCLUSIVE per claim. We freeze the specification before implementation (SHA-256 18d109...b81). On 1,392 historical buyer--seller records, a CR-2 verifier reproduces all five manually labeled audit verdicts, exactly replays 600 deterministic and 792 post-generation records, makes every one of 13 declared field groups non-redundant under tested ablations, and returns the expected result on 11/11 semantic faults with 0/8 false positives. We then run a separate prospective CR-3 epoch: 30 assignments are committed before inference, terminal receipts are signed and chained, and private evidence is encrypted for an auditor. Complete evidence yields coverage and accounting PASS; withholding one terminal receipt returns INCONCLUSIVE_COVERAGE, while withholding all private openings preserves coverage and protocol verification but makes economic claims inconclusive, exactly matching a preregistered prediction. Receipt instrumentation adds 0.021% of model-inference time and 9.9 KB per transaction. A specification-legibility probe indicates that our own frozen specification is not yet unambiguous to an independent reader. Claim verification therefore requires both claim-sufficient evidence and a committed universe against which omissions become visible.

Submitted to Who Verifies the Agents? Toward Reliable Agent Development (NeurIPS 2026 workshop). 8 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2609.01992 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.01992v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01992 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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