ClaimReceipt: Verifying Evidence Sufficiency and Coverage in Agent Evaluations

arXiv:2609.01992v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent evaluations face two distinct evidentiary questions: whether a reported claim is recomputable from retained evidence (sufficiency), and whether the retained records cover the committed experiment set (coverage).

Generic logs and hash-linked transcripts answer neither reliably.

We introduce ClaimReceipt, a claim-relative receipt specification and selective verifier that binds typed transaction evidence to a signed experiment manifest and returns PASS, INVALID, or INCONCLUSIVE per claim. We freeze the specification before implementation (SHA-256 18d109...b81).

On 1,392 historical buyer--seller records, a CR-2 verifier reproduces all five manually labeled audit verdicts, exactly replays 600 deterministic and 792 post-generation records, makes every one of 13 declared field groups non-redundant under tested ablations, and returns the expected result on 11/11 semantic faults with 0/8 false positives.

We then run a separate prospective CR-3 epoch: 30 assignments are committed before inference, terminal receipts are signed and chained, and private evidence is encrypted for an auditor.

Complete evidence yields coverage and accounting PASS; withholding one terminal receipt returns INCONCLUSIVE_COVERAGE, while withholding all private openings preserves coverage and protocol verification but makes economic claims inconclusive, exactly matching a preregistered prediction. Receipt instrumentation adds 0.021% of model-inference time and 9.9 KB per transaction.

A specification-legibility probe indicates that our own frozen specification is not yet unambiguous to an independent reader. Claim verification therefore requires both claim-sufficient evidence and a committed universe against which omissions become visible.