Randomized trial explores a human-directed loop for formal verification in AI-assisted math, highlighting trust and precision implications.
AI can now write mathematics and code faster than humans can vet it, and in a proof assistant a proof that merely compiles is not enough: the load-bearing content can hide in a declared axiom, and "it builds, with no sorry" cannot distinguish a sound development from one resting on a false, vacuous, or over-strong assumption. This paper presents a human-directed, two-model formalization loop built around that gap. A coding agent (Claude Code) writes Lean 4 / Mathlib and self-corrects against the compiler; an independent model (GPT-5.5-Pro) adversarially reviews the design rather than the syntax; and a human controls scope and premises. The soundness contribution is the audit that wraps the loop: a continuously-enforced axiom budget that classifies every result as proved/conditional/cited and can only ratchet down; a vacuity lint and a hypothesis ledger / redundancy probe that extend the audit from declared axioms to a theorem's local hypotheses; a goal-directed track-state report that turns the audit into the loop's steering signal; and a link-checked blueprint from prose to kernel-checked declarations. A small controlled instrument ablation shows that the structural instruments catch structural faults while only the independent reviewer diagnoses the semantic ones (a false-but-well-typed axiom, a circular hypothesis). As a demanding case study, the loop is driven to a machine-checked, project-axiom-free Lean theorem that derives, conditionally, the Einstein field equations from a finite-information capacity bound by a Jacobson-style equation of state, with the cited physics inputs carried as explicit, labelled hypotheses and a machine-checked witness that the premise set is jointly satisfiable. The case study stresses the workflow, not physics: verification certifies the conditional mathematics and the absence of any hidden axiom; it does not establish the cited inputs or the framework's physical postulates, which remain open.
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Paweł Kapłański (2026) studied this question.
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