Verifying the Verifier

Verifying the Verifier is the second brief in the AVAAS methodology series. It answers the oldest question in governance, who verifies the verifier, as it applies to a certification body that grades the behavior of deployed AI systems. The brief specifies the AVAAS trust stack, eight layers that make the certifier auditable by construction rather than trusted on reputation. Structural separation removes the economic motive to shade a grade. Mechanical ground truth keeps model judgment out of load-bearing facts. A cryptographic registry removes the possibility of silent revision. Evidence bundles make every grade re-derivable by an authorized auditor. Published methodology exposes the theory to open criticism while versioned confidential instruments protect test validity. Disclosed grade distribution makes a captured certifier statistically visible. Empirical validation through insurer loss performance and falsifiable public incident analysis subjects the standard itself to the audit of reality. Human oversight is placed at points of leverage, standard setting, calibration sampling, exception adjudication, and named signature, so accountability scales with volume instead of against it. The brief closes with the recursive commitment, under which AVAAS certifies its own evaluation deployment under its own standard as Registry Entry 001, and with the limitations of the stack stated plainly. This brief is published as a defensive disclosure. The mechanisms described are dedicated to the public domain at the architecture level upon publication. Instruments implementing them remain confidential for test validity. It continues AVAAS Methodology Brief 001 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21206896).