The honest science underneath.
A discipline about provable decisions must itself be provable. So the central claim was pre-registered before the data came in — and then it was tested honestly, even when the result was inconvenient.
The hypothesis was written down first.
The central question — does an assembly of artificial-intelligence agents make a consequential decision better than a strong human expert? — was registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) before the results were known. Pre-registration is the discipline that separates a finding from a story told after the fact.
Open Science Framework pre-registration. Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZWM3S. The hypothesis, method, and analysis plan were filed in advance; the results were published against that plan.
We tested whether the machine decides better. It does not.
The assembly-bonus hypothesis — that an artificial-intelligence board would out-decide a strong human expert — was disconfirmed. The system did not make the call better than the human, and it tended to over-reject. We report that plainly, because a discipline built on proof cannot bury its own.
The machine does not decide better than your experts. So let it assure the decision, and keep the judgment human.
A disconfirmed result is not a dead end. It is a design input.
The finding is the reason the discipline takes the assurance-not-control position — and it is written directly into the standard rather than left as a footnote.
Assurance, not control
If the machine does not decide better, it should not decide. Its job is to make the human decision provably sound — complete, consistent, governed, grounded, and on the record.
Caps written as policy
The Decision Assurance Levels cap autonomy by consequence. The higher the stakes, the more the standard requires a human to decide — because the evidence says so.
Revisable by design
The caps are stated as evidence-based and revisable. As confirmatory research arrives, the standard adjusts. The framework improves as the science does.
Most of this market is sold on a claim that has not been tested in the open.
Agentic artificial intelligence is entering governance, often sold as a smarter brain that decides for you. We pre-registered the opposite question, published the disconfirming result, and built the standard around it. That is the kind of evidence the discipline asks of every consequential decision — so it asks the same of itself.
Evidence-based is a founding principle, not a slogan. Guidance from the Council is grounded in research and outcomes, not assertion. Where the science is exploratory, we say so; where a confirmatory study can change a recommendation, the standard is versioned to absorb it.
The record is open.
The pre-registration is public. We encourage practitioners, analysts, and researchers to read the plan and the results directly, and to hold the standard to them.
Citation: Open Science Framework pre-registration, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZWM3S. The disconfirmation is reported against the registered analysis plan. Confirmatory work is planned; findings to date are exploratory and the standard's autonomy caps are stated as revisable accordingly.
Hold the discipline to its evidence.
Founding endorsers help keep the standard honest — grounded in research, revised in the open, and never oversold.