Signed Decision Receipts: Letting Anyone Verify an AI Outcome Offline

When an AI makes a decision that affects someone, they — or a regulator — may need to verify what happened. A signed decision receipt makes that possible without trust: a compact, portable record of the decision and its basis, signed so that anyone can confirm it's genuine and unaltered, on their own, offline.

What a decision receipt contains

A receipt is a small, self-contained record of a single AI outcome: what was decided, the inputs it was based on, which controls applied, and when. It's the difference between 'trust us, the system handled it correctly' and 'here is the artifact, check it yourself.' The receipt travels with the decision rather than staying locked inside your infrastructure.

Why "signed" changes everything

A record you produce is only as trustworthy as you are — the recipient has to assume you didn't edit it. A signed record removes that assumption. The receipt is cryptographically signed, and the signing key is published at a well-known location. Anyone can take the receipt, fetch the public key, and verify the signature themselves. If a single character were altered, the signature would fail. Its authenticity is mathematical, not reputational.

Verifying offline, with no access to your systems

The strongest property of a signed receipt is that verification needs nothing from you. The recipient doesn't log into your platform, doesn't query your database, doesn't file a request and wait. They hold the receipt and the published key, and they check. This is what makes a receipt suitable for the moments that matter — a dispute, an audit, a regulator's inquiry — where 'you'll have to take our word for it' is exactly the wrong answer.

Receipts and the ledger

Receipts and the hash-chained ledger are two faces of the same guarantee. The ledger is the complete, internal, tamper-evident record of everything that happened; a receipt is a portable, individually verifiable slice of it for a single decision. The ledger answers 'show me everything, in order, unaltered.' The receipt answers 'prove this one outcome, to someone who has no access to the rest.'

Where receipts matter most

• Automated decisions about people — where a subject is entitled to an explanation they can verify, not just receive.
• Disputes — where the question is 'what actually happened,' and a signed artifact settles it.
• Regulatory inquiries — where offline-verifiable evidence is worth more than a dashboard login.
• Cross-organization workflows — where a decision made in one system has to be trusted by another that can't see inside it.

In each case the receipt does the same job: it moves trust from the institution to the mathematics.

Move trust to the math. See how signed decision receipts let a user, an auditor, or a regulator verify an AI outcome offline — against a published key, with no access to your systems. Book a walkthrough.