Proof Debt
The accumulated stock of AI-generated work whose verification cost, uncertainty or liability has not been resolved yet — deferred liability the P&L doesn't show.
Proof Debt is the accumulated stock of AI-generated work whose verification cost, uncertainty or liability has not been resolved yet: unproven assumptions, missing evidence artifacts, decisions nobody can replay. It is the sibling of technical debt — but where tech debt lives in code, proof debt lives in everything your organization has accepted from machines without independent confirmation.
It compounds by a simple recurrence: ProofDebt(t+1) = max(0, ProofDebt(t) + GeneratedWork − ProvenWork − RejectedWork). When agents generate faster than your verification capacity can prove or reject, the remainder accrues — silently. The P&L does not show it. An incident, an audit or a customer claim prices it, all at once, at the worst possible moment.
Proof Debt is the shadow side of Proof-Adjusted Autonomy: PAA measures the share of work that arrives proven; proof debt is the stock of everything that did not. The law that follows is the operational core of the framework — sustainable autonomy cannot exceed proof capacity. Safe throughput is min(generation rate, proof rate), and every deployment that ignores the second term is borrowing against a future incident.
Frequently asked questions
What is proof debt?
The accumulated stock of AI-generated work whose verification cost, uncertainty or liability has not been resolved: unproven assumptions, missing artifacts, unreplayable decisions. Like technical debt, it is invisible on the P&L until an incident, audit or customer claim prices it.
How does proof debt accumulate?
ProofDebt(t+1) = max(0, ProofDebt(t) + GeneratedWork − ProvenWork − RejectedWork). Whenever agents generate work faster than the organization can independently verify or reject it, the unproven remainder accrues as debt.
How is proof debt different from technical debt?
Technical debt is a known trade-off in code that engineers can see and schedule. Proof debt is accepted machine output whose correctness was never independently established — it spans code, documents, decisions and data, and its owner is usually undefined until something fails.
Source analyses
Related terms
Term defined and maintained by Michał Piszczek — CTO of Archdesk, author of the Joule Wars and Proof-Adjusted Autonomy frameworks. Quote freely with attribution to piszczek.pl/glossary (CC BY 4.0).