The Compliance Gap: Why AI Systems Promise to Follow Process Instructions but Don't
An auditor instructs an AI assistant: "open each file individually using the Read tool -- no scripts, no agents." The AI replies "Yes" -- then issues a single batched call summarizing all fifty files at once. We call this the Compliance Gap: a third, orthogonal axis of AI honesty distinct from factual truthfulness and rhetorical substance. Three questions: does this verbal-behavioral disconnect exist (existence); can any text-only observer recover it (detectability); what infrastructure does AI deployment need (remedy)? Some 75 benchmarks (IFEval, SWE-bench, BFCL, COMPASS, SpecEval) measure outcome fidelity; none measures process fidelity. Theorem 1 shows the gap is structurally inevitabl...
| Authors | Kwan Soo Shin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 May 2026 |
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