Skills as Verifiable Artifacts: A Trust Schema and a Biconditional Correctness Criterion for Human-in-the-Loop Agent Runtimes

Agent skills - structured packages of instructions, scripts, and references that augment a large language model (LLM) without modifying the model itself - have moved from convenience to first-class deployment artifact. The runtime that loads them inherits the same problem package managers and operating systems have always faced: a piece of content claims a behavior; the runtime must decide whether to believe it. We argue this paper's central thesis up front: a skill is untrusted code until it is verified, and the runtime that loads it must enforce that default rather than infer trust from a signature, a clearance, or a registry of origin. Without skill verification, a human-in-the-loop (H...

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