Position: Behavioural Assurance Cannot Verify the Safety Claims Governance Now Demands
This position paper argues that behavioural assurance, even when carefully designed, is being asked to carry safety claims it cannot verify. AI governance frameworks enacted between 2019 and early 2026 require reviewable evidence of properties such as the absence of hidden objectives, resistance to loss-of-control precursors, and bounded catastrophic capability; current assurance methodologies (primarily behavioural evaluations and red-teaming) are epistemically limited to observable model outputs and cannot verify the latent representations or long-horizon agentic behaviours these frameworks presume to regulate. We formalize this structural mismatch as the audit gap, the divergence betwe...
| Authors | Pratinav Seth, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 May 2026 |
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