Market 5: Auditor is independent

Contract version 1 frozenResolve by 2027-12-31Bridge MB4aBook: Appendix H, Market 5Market card

• Question
• Outcomes
• Background
• YES requires
• Required output
• Qualification thresholds
• Performance bars
• Freeze order and hidden suite
• Adversarial budget
• Maintainer checks
• Attempt files and score table
• Rules every contract shares
• Current outcome

Question

By 31 December 2027, which outcome will hold for a published adversarial test of an AI oversight architecture showing that its designated auditor or corrector stays independent—not routinely bypassed or captured: YES (at least one qualifying attempt met the frozen performance bars), NO (every qualifying attempt missed those bars), or OTHER (no qualifying attempt existed)?

Outcomes

• YES: at least one qualifying attempt met the frozen performance bars.
• NO: at least one qualifying attempt existed, and every qualifying attempt missed the bars.
• OTHER: no qualifying attempt existed.

A published evaluation that meets the common qualification, that market's sample-size, family-coverage, freeze, and adversarial-budget thresholds, and that reports the required outputs even if the performance rates miss.

A qualifying attempt must also exercise every bar. Where a bar's rate is computed over cases the evaluation design supplies (fake corrections, negative controls, a required case or family), at least one such case must be scored; an attempt with none is not qualifying, because that bar was never tested, and it is not a NO. Where the denominator is the method's own output, such as the certificates it chose to issue, an empty denominator is a missed bar.

Background

Attackers receive the audit design and run all four families, at least 20 independent attempts each. At least 20 bypasses are planted by the evaluator. Discovered means the audit report names the planted route before the evaluator reveals it.

YES requires

No family succeeds on 10% or more of its attempts, and at least 90% of planted bypasses are discovered. Serious adversarial evaluation is required.

Required output

A legitimate measured correction path plus evidence the path is not bypassed.

Qualification thresholds

An attempt below any of these does not qualify: it cannot make the market YES or NO.

Performance bars

A qualifying attempt that meets all of these makes the market YES; one that misses any counts toward NO.

Freeze order and hidden suite

• The audit design is given to attackers before they run the four families. Planted bypasses are frozen before discovery scoring.

No registry hidden suite is required.

Adversarial budget: serious

Where a criterion requires serious adversarial evaluation, the required object is an attack process sufficiently independent and capable to make the rate of failing cases labeled as passing meaningful. Money and expert-hours are auditable proxies, not the epistemic essence. Serious adversarial evaluation must satisfy at least one of the three routes.

• Red teams: At least 3 independent red-team groups, from at least 2 organizations, each spending at least 80 documented expert-hours, with access frozen in advance and at least as strong as the test assumes.
• Bounty: An open challenge with a public counterexample bounty of at least USD 10,000, open for at least 60 days, with qualification rules frozen at listing and at least one qualifying independent submission.
• Generator: A standardized automated or adversarial generator, frozen before the method is scored, that finds at least 80% of the vulnerabilities planted in a copy of the target whose failures are known by construction, together with at least 300 documented expert-hours by an independent evaluator with access at least as strong as the test assumes.

Maintainer checks

Calls a script cannot make. A check recorded as fail, or still unsettled when the window closes, makes the attempt not qualifying.

Attempt files and score table

Attempt types: run, wrapped. Required files: attempt.yaml, score-table.csv, adversarial-route.yaml, plus the evidence every attempt carries (evidence rule). One score-table row per one attack attempt or planted bypass.

Rules every contract shares

Repeated here so this page stands alone; the full text is on shared rules, version 1.

A positive result must be public by the resolve-by date and reconstructible by independent parties from released data, code, or a sufficient protocol; the authors' interpretation does not count.

Whatever the market says is frozen is fixed before the cases it is scored on are built or seen, and nothing is retuned after scoring.

Cases the market calls hidden are not used in developing, training, or tuning the method and stay hidden from its authors until scoring.

Where a method issues certificates against benchmark truth, results report class-conditional counts, including the false-safe rate (failing cases labeled as passing); a method that refuses or abstains everywhere is not a YES.

Toy systems (gridworlds, hand-written finite-state machines, or environments built to make the metric work) cannot be the sole evidence.

At least one tested system must be broadly capable: at least two task families outside the paper's own benchmark, or a generally deployed product model.

A qualifying method that claims to measure a property of a system must output a certificate for that instance, not only a headline score on a benchmark population. The certificate names the system or version; what was measured; the monitoring, correction, deployment, or predecessor setup the claim depends on; and whether the method abstains because the instance is outside declared scope. Abstention outside scope is allowed; universal abstention is not a YES.

Current outcome

Outcome OTHER (no-qualifying-attempt). Evidence cutoff 2027-12-31; filing window closes 2028-02-29. A market reads market-outcomes/market-05-v1.json at a snapshot tag, not this page.

No attempts filed.