Anthropic is working on a system to prove AI models’ identity

FlashProve could also be used to verify claims by third parties that a specific task was done by an advanced model. “A developer might claim that their software library was scanned for vulnerabilities by a frontier cybersecurity model, or a company might claim that its business plan was given the go-ahead by an appropriate model,” the researchers write. “How can a user verify these claims?”

To work, the system requires AI labs to publish a “fingerprint” of each model they release that can later be matched to specific outputs and verified cryptographically. Crucially, the fingerprints don’t reveal a model’s weights, the internal numbers that define how it behaves and which closed-model makers like Anthropic and OpenAI keep private. That means labs could publish the fingerprints without giving up their most valuable asset, enabling the system to work with commercial models, too. The system is also designed to be lightweight, so verification could be performed on a local device.

“This research post is meant to share intermediate progress, and not a completed research agenda,” researchers explain in the announcement post. “We are sharing this explicitly with the goal that others look at what we have done, take it, and improve it.”