The Law Has the Button: Why a veto without a criterion is not oversight, and what to record instead

The EU AI Act supplies the button. Article 14(4)(e) requires that the operator of a high-risk system be able to interrupt it "through a stop button or a similar procedure", and Article 14(4)(d) grants a veto over its output. What the Act does not supply, anywhere, is a criterion for when to use either — and a veto without a criterion is a rubber stamp that satisfies the provisions exactly. The paper reads what the Regulation records and argues what is missing from it. It shows that oversight is regulated in exactly two modes — ex ante descriptions of the mechanism, and automatic logs of events — with one record of a human act, Article 12(3)(d), which records who verified and nothing about what they decided. It takes the strongest objection seriously: deference to a more reliable authority is rational on the standard account, and this paper does not argue that operators should appraise independently. What it argues instead is that the licence Raz and his successors describe is conditional on the subject being able to identify that the authority tracks better — and in this arrangement the identification evidence and the output come from the same source, so the licence never engages and the statutory duty has nothing to attach to. It specifies five requirements for an audit-ready record, of which two — record the commit before the output is visible, and record who supplied the contradiction — are the things no instrument located here requires at all. And section 7 states four findings that would refute it. The claim is institutional, not epistemic. For the operator who defers, nothing changes; the record is load-bearing for whoever has standing to read it. That is a smaller claim than the claim that operators should be educated, and it is the one that can be enforced. Every quotation was checked against the artefact it comes from: the Regulation against the Official Journal text, the studies against their own PDFs, Raz against the book.