Conformance as a Distribution: Delegation Contracts, Error Budgets, and the Allocation of Evaluation Authority in Use-Based AI Regulation

John deVadoss

Use-based AI regulation assigns obligations by deployment risk but lacks an evidentiary object to carry them. A benchmark score is a property of a model; conformance of a deployment is a failure rate under a declared distribution of contexts, bounded by a scope and subject to expiry. We take the delegation contract of earlier work (frozen configuration, scoped claim, executable revision rule) and study it under strategic play between a deployer, an auditor, and an enforcement point. We ask whether a declared context mixture can be made truthful; whether an audit can be unbiased against a system that detects evaluation traffic; whether a certification error budget can sustain a long-lived deployment; whether an aggregate audit can support a per-subgroup guarantee; and whether an incident metric that counts system failures but not fallback costs ranks arrangements correctly. For each we give a mechanism and a proposition: a proper-scoring penalty on the declared mixture bounds the excess failure of a best-responding deployer by $O(λ^{-1/2})$ in the penalty weight; a commit-reveal audit drawn from live traffic is unbiased by construction and grades the evaluator with the same…