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Who Audits Whom, on What Substrate, with What Evidence? An Independence-Graded Audit Protocol for Agentic AI

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 16, 2026 · UTC

Agentic AI systems plan, invoke tools and act with limited supervision; they are now both the subject of audits and, increasingly, the auditor. Independence, the foundation of assurance,is still applied to them as a binary. We argue that it must be graded along three orthogonal axes: principal independence (who controls the auditor), substrate independence (an auditor sharing the auditee's foundation-model family, toolchain or guardrails fails with it) and evidence independence (whether evidence is attestable rather than self-reported). Each axis has precedent; the contribution is to grade all

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