That’s a really good point, and I think you’re exactly right about temporal ordering being the real anchor. ACV is deliberately closer to a consensus primitive than to an “inspection” mechanism—once internals are opaque, provenance is the only invariant left that survives adversarial optimization.
One clarification: the current ACV construction is intentionally single-agent and single-kernel. It proves a narrow negative result—namely that replay and post-hoc rationalization collapse under anchored commitments—before taking on compositional settings.
In multi-agent scenarios the verification problem itself does become gameable, unless additional structure is imposed. The direction we’re exploring is to treat verification as a consensus-like process over commitments, where each agent’s anchor constrains not just its own action trace, but the space of mutually consistent traces across agents. At that point, the attack surface shifts from “fake explanations” to coalitional degeneracy, which is a different failure mode.
In other words: ACV scales only if the verification layer is promoted to a first-class coordination protocol, not as a passive auditor. That boundary—between provenance guarantees and adversarial coordination—is exactly where the next work sits.
That’s a really good point, and I think you’re exactly right about temporal ordering being the real anchor. ACV is deliberately closer to a consensus primitive than to an “inspection” mechanism—once internals are opaque, provenance is the only invariant left that survives adversarial optimization.
One clarification: the current ACV construction is intentionally single-agent and single-kernel. It proves a narrow negative result—namely that replay and post-hoc rationalization collapse under anchored commitments—before taking on compositional settings.
In multi-agent scenarios the verification problem itself does become gameable, unless additional structure is imposed. The direction we’re exploring is to treat verification as a consensus-like process over commitments, where each agent’s anchor constrains not just its own action trace, but the space of mutually consistent traces across agents. At that point, the attack surface shifts from “fake explanations” to coalitional degeneracy, which is a different failure mode.
In other words: ACV scales only if the verification layer is promoted to a first-class coordination protocol, not as a passive auditor. That boundary—between provenance guarantees and adversarial coordination—is exactly where the next work sits.