What Output-Only Review Cannot Verify: Study Contracts for Research Agents

Eitan Waks, Ben Glocker

Some defects in an AI-generated study can be identified from its artifacts; others require knowledge of what was approved before execution. We propose study contracts that bind declared experimental choices, run obligations and claim scope to recorded execution evidence, and distinguish this contract-relative verification from scientific truth. A diagnostic using eight self-authored clean/mutated pairs illustrates the information boundary. A deterministic checker applying a registered, fault-specific rule to approved and executed objects detected all eight registered mutations. Across eighteen recorded judge aliases given individual metadata-filtered packages without pair context or the registry-selected fault label, 104 of 144 mutated evaluation cases received defect flags; the remaining cases comprised 32 abstentions and eight terminal failures, with no explicit clean decisions on mutated cases. Some packages retained approval and execution fields, including digests. The prompt instructed judges to abstain when evidence was insufficient. These results characterize a deliberately information-asymmetric development setting; they do not isolate the effect of authoritative…