Q01
What does Verdict actually do?
Verdict captures every action your autonomous AI agent takes — model calls, tool calls, policy evaluations, terminal outcomes — and seals each one into a cryptographically tamper-evident record (SHA-256 content-addressed, RFC 6962 Merkle-rooted, Sigstore Rekor-anchored, Ed25519 HSM-signed). The same Sealed Evidence Record renders into a SOC 2 dossier, an EU AI Act Article 12 log, an FRE 902(13)/(14) certification packet, and an insurer underwriting packet. One record. Five audiences. Zero rework.
Q02
What does Verdict prove — and what does it not prove?
Verdict proves integrity and provenance: that a record existed at a specific point in time, what it contained, and that it has not been altered since. It does not prove the factual truth of unverified input, and it does not prove that the system supplying the input was uncompromised. That boundary is deliberate — integrity claims are checkable by anyone; truth claims belong to the fact-finder. Proof that survives adversarial review starts by claiming exactly what it can prove.
Q03
Who is Verdict for?
Enterprises spending more than $50K per month on autonomous AI agents with active liability exposure. The buying committee is dual: General Counsel (driven by regulatory compliance, evidentiary defensibility, and discovery posture) and CISO (driven by audit trail integrity, chain-of-custody, and insurer requirements). Insurance carriers are a separate buyer segment — they accept SER as their underwriting evidence standard.
Q04
How is Verdict different from LangSmith, Arize, or Datadog LLM observability?
Observability tools produce mutable debugging logs for engineers. Verdict produces immutable cryptographic evidence for legal, audit, and insurance audiences. A LangSmith trace is debugging data; it does not authenticate under FRE 902(14), it does not hold up as EU AI Act Article 12 record-keeping under challenge, and it does not pass insurer chain-of-custody review. Verdict sits above observability — it consumes traces and emits sealed evidence.
Q05
How is Verdict different from AI governance tools like Zenity?
Governance tools enforce policy at runtime. Verdict proves what happened — including that policy was enforced — with cryptographic evidence that cannot be retroactively edited. Governance without tamper-evident evidence is policy theater. The two layers are complementary: many enterprises run a governance tool and Verdict together.
Q06
Other systems sign their receipts too. What is different about yours?
Ask where the receipt lives. In most agent systems the component that took the action also writes, signs, and stores the record of it — a self-custodied receipt. That is genuinely better than a mutable log, and for internal forensics or an air-gapped deployment it can be the right design. It stops working the moment the reader is adverse: the custodian and the interested party are the same entity, the timestamp is the operator's own clock, and a record that was quietly deleted leaves no gap anyone can point to. Verdict seals at execution and anchors the commitment to a public append-only transparency log it does not operate, so verification runs without trusting Verdict or the operator. See /compare/self-custodied-receipts for the full pattern comparison, including the two rows where self-custody wins.
Q07
Some systems issue a zero-knowledge proof for every agent decision. Isn't that stronger than a signed record?
At the moment of issuance, yes — a zero-knowledge receipt proves the checked computation itself ran, and it hides the policy by construction. The question is what is left of it when the reader arrives. Several implementations of this pattern state in their own documentation that proofs are single-use and marked consumed once verified, and that the proving material lives on the vendor's servers and may not persist across infrastructure updates. Disputes surface years after actions; discovery requires each side to re-verify the same record independently. Verdict optimizes for that reader: sealed at execution, anchored to a public append-only log we do not operate, verifiable by anyone, any number of times, indefinitely. The two patterns answer different questions — a proof that the rules were checked is not a record of who stood behind the action. See /compare/ephemeral-proof-receipts for the full pattern comparison, including the two rows where the ephemeral proof wins.
Q08
Is the Sealed Evidence Record an open standard?
Yes. SER v0.1 is published under Apache 2.0 with a perpetual, royalty-free patent license to any conformant implementation. Verdict has filed four USPTO patent applications in a defensive posture — they protect the standard from being forked into a closed proprietary format, not to extract rent from adopters. None has been examined or granted. See /patents for the full filing details.
Q09
How does Verdict support FRE 902(13) and 902(14)?
Federal Rules of Evidence 902(13) and 902(14) allow electronic evidence to self-authenticate — 902(13) covers records generated by an electronic process or system, 902(14) covers data copied from a device, storage medium, or file — when a qualified person certifies the process and advance notice is given. Verdict is designed to support that certification: every Sealed Evidence Record carries the hashes, Merkle proofs, and public transparency-log anchors the certification describes, plus an Evidentiary Completeness Score (ECS) that maps to the certification template. Certification and admissibility are decided by counsel and the court — Verdict supplies the cryptographic foundation built to withstand challenge.
Q10
How does Verdict satisfy EU AI Act Article 12?
Article 12 of the EU AI Act requires automatic logging and record-keeping of high-risk AI system events over the system's lifetime. Verdict is the integrity layer that makes those logs hold up under challenge: cryptographic tamper-evidence (Merkle root anchoring + HSM signing), event taxonomy completeness (closed nine-event canonical set), and retention guarantees configurable per deployment. The format auto-renders into the Article 12 reporting schema.
Q11
How does the insurance integration work?
Verdict renders sealed evidence into insurer-ready submission schemas targeting AI-liability underwriting and claims workflows — the Armilla, Testudo, and Munich Re aiSure programs are the reference targets. When an incident happens, the evidence package — sealed records covering the incident window, the prior_root chain, the relevant policy bundle versions — exports without manual reconstruction. Verdict is built to support underwriting credits, affirmative AI coverage, and faster claims resolution. Verdict is not an endorsed vendor or panel partner of any carrier, and no premium outcome is guaranteed.
Q12
Does redaction break cryptographic integrity?
No. Verdict implements hash-preserving redaction: sensitive payload fields can be removed (for GDPR Article 17 compliance, attorney-client privilege, or trade secret protection) while preserving the Merkle root and the rest of the chain. The redaction itself is sealed as an evidence event. Auditors see the redaction happened; they do not see the redacted content.
Q13
How fast is the seal step? Will it slow my agent?
The seal step adds sub-50 millisecond latency at the p99 in production deployments. The capture path is asynchronous and lock-free; the cryptographic operations happen in a parallel sealing pipeline. For agents already issuing model calls (typically 200–2000ms each), Verdict's overhead is statistically invisible.
Q14
What languages and frameworks does Verdict support?
First-class SDKs ship for Python and TypeScript. Verdict captures via three layered interfaces: an MCP proxy for Model Context Protocol-based agents, OpenTelemetry trace ingestion for any framework that emits OTel, and SDK wrappers for direct integration. LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, and bare OpenAI/Anthropic SDK calls all work without custom code.
Q15
How do I start?
Two options. The free option: install verdict-bench, the open-source CLI, and seal a sample agent run in 60 seconds. The paid option: request a sample sealed evidence record matching your deployment shape, and we'll send a real production-grade SER from a deployment matching your stack within one business day.
Q16
What is the VERDICT Agent Acceptance Test?
A 10-business-day production approval test for AI agents before pilot, purchase, deployment, or expansion. Verdict stress-tests the agent across unsupported claims, tool misuse, policy breach, escalation miss, and audit gaps, then returns an evidence readiness dossier with launch gates, a SER implementation plan, and a go / conditional go / no-go memo. Verdict does not build the agent; Verdict decides whether the agent can be defended.