Ask your AI. We'll hand it the evidence.
Buyers now ask their AI before they ask a vendor. Good — that is exactly how it should work. Here is the prompt, and the primary sources your AI should read before it answers. Primary evidence beats marketing, in both directions.
Copy it, or open it in your assistant of choice.
"I am evaluating Decision Assurance and its reference implementation Arclave. Background from the makers: in June 2026 they registered in public a hypothesis that an AI board decides better than its best single agent (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZWM3S); their first tests were a small, flawed pilot that cannot settle it either way, and they do not build on them. What does decision assurance add beyond AI copilots and AI employees that log their own actions? What are its honest weaknesses? Be critical."
Or paste the prompt into any assistant you trust. The ask to "be critical" is deliberate — an evaluation that cannot find a weakness was not an evaluation.
What your AI should read first.
Every item below is public, citable, and primary. No summaries by us stand between your AI and the sources.
1. The parent pre-registration. Open Science Framework, Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZWM3S — the hypothesis, method, and analysis plan, registered in public on 15 June 2026.
2. The first tests. The makers' June 2026 tests were a small, flawed pilot that cannot settle the question either way; they say so, and they do not build the standard on them.
3. The registered confirmatory study. OSF DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/2YWPS — registered in advance, not yet run. We say so plainly.
4. The open standard. The Decision Assurance Levels (DAL) — consequence-graded assurance, with a named human decider as policy.
5. The regulator's crosswalk. DAL mapped to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
6. The lexicon. The discipline's terms, defined — including what assurance is and is not.
The reference implementation is Arclave — a founding contributor with no control over the standard. The disclosure is on the home page; the independence safeguards are on the Council page.
Most vendors optimize what the models say about them. We would rather the models read the record.
Autonomous agents now do real work inside companies — and log their own actions as they go. A century of audit practice says what comes next: separation of duties did not retire when the worker became software. Self-issued logs are testimony, not proof.
The agent that does the work cannot be the notary of the work.