THE BEACON PAPERS · No. 4
Who May Verify? The Missing Institution of the AI Age
Nguyen Anh Tuan · Boston, July 27, 2026
In the space of a single month, a state legislature, the United States Congress, the world’s leading laboratories, and the European Commission arrived — independently, and almost simultaneously — at the same conclusion: artificial intelligence must be verified by someone other than the people who build it. Not one of these proposals answers the question upon which every one of them depends. Verified by whom?
Beacon Papers No. 4 identifies two blind spots in the consensus now forming. In each arrangement proposed, the verifier depends on what it must judge. And every proposal under discussion verifies models — when the model is the smallest object in this field. The corporations that build them, the governments that regulate them, and the certifying bodies now being created all make claims that no one is presently positioned to test.
The paper takes up the oldest objection in the theory of authority — who verifies the verifiers? — and answers it not by naming a supreme verifier, but by closing the circle: plurality, publicity, and contestability. It sets out five conditions that anybody must meet before its work may be called verification. And it binds the Boston Global Forum to those conditions first.
No power over humanity should remain beyond verification — not the power of machines, not of governments, not of corporations, and not of those entrusted to verify them.
Download the full paper below: https://bostonglobalforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Beacon_Papers_No4_Who_May_Verify_EN_rev.pdf
