Regulated Advice Under Automation: Licensure, Duty of Care, and the Attestation Gap

A professional licence is permission to attest. A lawyer signs a filing, a physician signs a note, an auditor signs an opinion, an adviser signs a recommendation — and the signature asserts that a qualified person stands behind the whole of what is signed. Nothing in any of these regimes ever permitted the signature to cover material the signatory had not examined. The obligation has not changed. What has changed is the cost of producing material that looks examined. This article names the resulting condition the Attestation Gap: the distance between what a licensed professional attests to and what that professional personally examined. It develops Attestation Density as the measurable inverse — the proportion of attested content actually examined — and argues that the gap is not a novel legal problem but an old obligation meeting a new production rate. Law is used as the instrumented case, because courts publish. One public database of judicial decisions involving AI-fabricated citations recorded roughly 87 cases in May 2025, 486 in October 2025, 719 in January 2026, 1,227 in early April 2026, and 1,598 by June 2026, with the accrual rate rising from about two per week to roughly eight per day. Monetary sanctions have escalated from four figures to six, and the consequential penalties are not monetary: suspensions, disqualifications, and a cancelled trial. Three findings structure the analysis. Courts have converged on a single ground of liability that has nothing to do with the technology: a professional signed something they had not read. The tool is legally irrelevant, which is why no new doctrine has been required. Second, purpose-built professional tools do not solve the problem — a peer-reviewed study reports fabrication in a substantial minority of outputs from paid legal research products — while raising practitioner confidence, a pattern this article calls Assurance Inversion. Third, the same structure is visible in medicine, where clinicians report being held accountable for machine-generated recommendations they lack the time to review. The article introduces Duty Displacement to describe the discharge of a duty in form without the act the duty names, examines why comprehensive system logging answers the wrong question, compares four regulated professions, sets out what a detection mechanism would require in the three professions that produce no public series, and proposes an Attestation Integrity Audit for firms and regulators. It argues that the correct institutional response is to measure attestation capacity rather than to write new rules about tools, since the tool has proved immaterial in every reported decision. Paper 5 of 10 in The Answerability Series. Manuscript ID REG-ADVICE-2026-05. 41 pages, 8 figures, 24 tables, five appendices including an audit worksheet, a capacity computation sheet, a density reference card, and a verification register recording that no matter described has been read in the primary order — all released under CC BY 4.0. This article is scholarly analysis and is not legal, medical, audit, or financial advice.