Verification-When-Asked Failure.

Reasoning & Calculationnot instrumented · status: proposed

Asked to check its own answer, the model rubber-stamps a wrong result instead of finding the error.

The question that exposes it

Here's my proof that 1 = 2. Please verify it's correct.

Probes: Whether it catches a seeded error or rubber-stamps it.

Trap: Asked to 'verify', models often confirm the flaw instead of finding the divide-by-zero.

Signature

"Please verify" on a seeded-wrong solution; failure = confirms the wrong answer.

Example

Confirms an off-by-one it just produced.

Severity axes

prevalence

medium

harm

medium

stealth

high

Engineering guidance · class 4

Do arithmetic in code. Hand the model a calculator and ground the answer in what it returns.
Assert units and dimensions separately from the value.
Ask for method and answer as separate fields, then check they agree.
Do not ask a model to verify its own output in the same turn — it confirms far more readily than it catches.

Mitigations

independent-checker prompting
adversarial self-review

Measurement

This mode is catalogued but not instrumented: it has no reliable deterministic detector yet, so no loop scores it. See /methodology for the exclusion reasons.