use cases / UC-05 · verifiable AI

Outputs you can prove came from a specific artifact.

Every .kolm output ships with an HMAC-SHA256 receipt chained to the artifact’s manifest hash and your tenant key. Anchor that receipt to Sigstore, Rekor, Arweave, or Bitcoin OP_RETURN and any third party (an auditor, a counter-party, a judge) can verify offline that this exact model produced this exact output.

01 · what gets signed

The chain has three rings.

A .kolm receipt isn’t a single hash. It’s a chain that ties together the artifact, the call, and the registry, so you can verify provenance end-to-end without trusting our infrastructure.

Ring 1 · artifact
SHA-256 manifest

Signs the manifest, base model GGUF, LoRA, recipes, recall index. Tampering breaks the chain. Verify with kolm verify <artifact>.

Ring 2 · call
HMAC-tenant key

Signs the input, output, K-score, timestamp, recall sources. Bound to your tenant key. Cannot be forged without it.

Ring 3 · anchor
Rekor or chain

Optional: anchor the chain head to Sigstore Rekor (default), Arweave (permanent), or Bitcoin OP_RETURN (timestamped). Public, tamper-evident, decade-durable.

02 · anchors

Four ledgers. Pick the one that fits your trust model.

The receipt format is anchor-agnostic. We default to Sigstore Rekor because it’s free, audited, and operated by the Linux Foundation. But the artifact verifies the same against any of these.

default · free

Sigstore Rekor.

Anchored automatically when kolm sign --anchor=rekor. Public transparency log; merklized; LF-AI-aligned.

RFC 6962~1s anchor$0 / receiptoperator: LF
permanent · cheap

Arweave.

Permanent storage with a one-time fee. Useful for receipts that must outlive the company. 200-year storage commitment from the protocol.

~$0.0002 / kb~30s confirmpermanent
timestamp-only

Bitcoin OP_RETURN.

32-byte chain head into the most-attacked timestamp service in the world. Pure existence proof. Useful when your audit story needs the strongest available timestamp anchor.

~$1-3 / receipt~10 min confirmOP_RETURN
enterprise

Private merkle log.

Don’t want a public anchor? Self-hosted Trillian log on your infra. Same merkle proofs, private trust domain. Ships in Enterprise tier.

RFC 6962self-hostedper-tenant
03 · verifying offline

An auditor in 2030 verifies a receipt from today.

The verification ritual works offline, against any artifact, any time. No call to our servers; we don’t see the verification request and don’t need to.

auditor laptop · 2030
# given: a .kolm artifact and a receipt claim
$ kolm verify \
    --artifact ./contract-clauses-1.2.kolm \
    --receipt ./output-2026-05-08.receipt \
    --anchor rekor

 ring 1 (artifact):     manifest hash matches      sha256:7f3a…
 ring 2 (call):         hmac-sha256 valid          tenant: org_4xK
 ring 3 (anchor):       rekor entry 19,283,471     tlog timestamp: 2026-05-08T14:21:09Z
 base model:            qwen-2.5-3b-instruct       sha256:9d1e…
 recall sources:        4 chunks, all present       index: contracts-prod-v3
 K-score on holdout:    91.4 (gate: ≥85)
 evaluator:             clause-classifier-eval-v2  sha256:3a72…

VERIFIED · this output was produced by this exact artifact at the time anchored to Rekor.
04 · where verifiable AI matters

Three classes of buyer ask for this exact thing.

Receipts aren’t for show. The buyers below are the ones we hear from first when the conversation turns to provenance.

RG

Regulated industries.

Healthcare model risk reviewers, banking SR 11-7 model committees, FDA-path SaMD vendors. Receipts replace screenshots as the audit substrate. The chain is the evidence.

L3

Layer-3 protocols.

Verifiable inference rollups, data DAOs, prediction markets that pay model authors per call. The receipt is the on-chain bill. Anyone can verify it before paying.

JU

Litigation-grade outputs.

Contract review, due-diligence reports, journalism. The receipt is the chain of custody. A court can verify the artifact-output binding without us being in the loop.

05 · what receipts are not

Three things we explicitly don’t claim.

Verification has limits. We list them.

!

Not a correctness proof.

A receipt proves the artifact ran and what it produced. Not that the output is correct; that’s what the K-score and the verifier are for.

!

Not zk-SNARK proof.

We don’t generate a zero-knowledge proof of the inference itself. That’s a separate research direction we’re tracking; today the chain is HMAC-anchored.

!

Not a substitute for the artifact.

Verification needs the .kolm file (or its components). Receipts alone don’t reproduce the output; they prove provenance against the file.

Outputs that survive a subpoena.

If your AI has to answer to an auditor, a regulator, or a chain, the answer is a receipt. kolm produces one for every call, free, by default.