{"ID":3084681,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-05T06:46:15.197025399Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-06T20:54:36.964885582Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05433","arxiv_id":"2606.05433","title":"Zero knowledge verification for frontier AI training is possible","abstract":"Frontier AI governance frameworks increasingly use cumulative training compute as the primary criterion for designating high-impact models, but enforcement rests on self-reporting because no technical verification primitive for training exists. Any future international agreement on frontier AI faces the same problem at higher stakes: coordinated regulation of technologies with significant externalities has historically rested on technical verification, without which agreements are declaratory. Recent governance analyses judge zero-knowledge proofs a promising candidate but currently impractical at frontier scale [26, 4]. We argue the impracticality is paradigm-bound rather than fundamental, and propose a verification architecture for frontier dense pre-training combining a pre-committed training specification, inter-node network observations, and on-the-fly Merkle commitments of intermediate computation, verified through a zero-knowledge Virtual Machine (zkVM) with native BF16/FP32 precompiles. The proof checks the actual floating-point computation the GPU performed rather than a fixed-point approximation, and preserves model-architecture confidentiality through a private training specification. The protocol produces three proof types: a genesis proof at initialisation, in-training step proofs across the run, and ex-ante attestations enforcing policy-relevant claims as running invariants, turning the training record into a governance-enforceable artefact. We estimate a deployable proof of concept within approximately 36 months at single-digit-percent training-side overhead, against a six-to-ten-year cycle for verification-grade custom silicon. Thirteen open research and engineering problems are catalogued as a research agenda for external contribution","short_abstract":"Frontier AI governance frameworks increasingly use cumulative training compute as the primary criterion for designating high-impact models, but enforcement rests on self-reporting because no technical verification primitive for training exists. Any future international agreement on frontier AI faces the same problem at...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05433","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.05433v1","authors":"[\"Pierre Peigné\",\"Ky Nguyen\",\"Paul Wang\"]","published":"2026-06-03T20:57:28Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\",\"eess.SY\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}