Can Power Draw Constrain Covert Compute? Limits of Analogue Verification for AI Governance
Frontier AI treaties or agreements on limiting computation require external verification; an external auditor must be able to confirm how much computation actually ran and that parties are adhering to the agreement. Analogue, off-chip measurements such as power draw provide an information channel for verification. It is unknown how well these analogue channels can constrain computation against an adversary who actively tries to subvert the audit. We derive a closed form for $β$, the largest hidden computation a power trace cannot exclude, as a fraction of the declared machine capacity. Measurements on NVIDIA A100 GPUs constrain $β= 1.16$ in the worst case, while adversarial matched-energy...
| Authors | Tom Kimpson, Mauricio Baker, Emlyn Graham |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 5 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 October 2026 |
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