{"schemaVersion":"0.1","generatedAt":"2026-10-09T19:38:23.794Z","entry":{"knowledgeKey":"responsible-ai-evidence","kind":"limitation","entityKey":"product","locale":"en","primaryQuestion":"Can a Decision Receipt show that an AI decision was fair, accurate or correct?","questionVariants":[{"question":"Does MeshQu prove the decision was right?"},{"question":"Can a receipt evidence our fairness commitment?"},{"question":"Does it explain what the model did?"},{"question":"Which of our responsible-AI commitments can this actually support?"}],"title":"What a receipt evidences about a responsible-AI commitment","answer":"No. A receipt shows which policy version and context governed the recorded assessment, and it lets another party verify that record afterwards. It does not establish that the inputs described the world correctly, that the ruleset encodes a defensible standard of fairness, or that the decision was right. Where a model produced a recommendation upstream of a governed decision, the receipt evidences the decision, not the model.","explanation":"A responsible-AI commitment and a decision record are different kinds of thing, and the documentation separates them carefully. Some commitments are statements of intent, describing a disposition an organisation holds. Others can be evidenced at the moment a specific decision is made, because a record can be produced showing the claim held for that decision. Neither kind is weaker than the other, but reaching for a decision-time record to support a commitment it cannot carry is a category error, and it produces confident-looking evidence for something nobody measured. What the record does carry is narrow. It shows that a decision was evaluated against a particular ruleset, bound to the context that was supplied. Whether that ruleset encodes a defensible standard is a question about the policy, answered by whoever wrote and approved it. Whether the supplied context described the world is a question about the inputs, which the record cannot settle because it binds what it was given.","applications":[{"value":"Sort a list of responsible-AI commitments into the ones a decision record can evidence and the ones it cannot, before the record is offered as evidence for any of them."},{"value":"Answer a regulator, auditor or customer who asks whether a signed record shows the decision was correct."},{"value":"Keep a fairness or accuracy question with the people who own the policy and the inputs, rather than deferring it to the artefact that records their use."}],"limitations":[{"value":"The accountability commitment is evidenced only partly. The record binds the actor identifier the calling application supplied; it does not authenticate it. See actor-identity."},{"value":"The record is narrow by design, and its value comes from being exactly as narrow as it says."},{"value":"Several responsibilities stay with the organisation and no release delivers them: whether the policy encodes a defensible standard, whether the supplied actor is the accountable party, the quality of any model or human judgement upstream, retention and publication, and how verifying parties obtain trusted roots."},{"value":"This entry states what a record evidences. It makes no statement about what is enabled in any particular deployment."}],"nextStep":{"label":"Responsible-AI evidence","href":"https://docs.meshqu.com/concepts/responsible-ai-evidence"},"claims":[{"claimKey":"not-fairness","statement":"A receipt does not evidence fairness. It evidences that a decision was evaluated against a particular ruleset; whether that ruleset encodes a defensible standard is a question about the policy, answered by whoever wrote and approved it.","qualification":"The question is not unanswerable. It is answered by policy governance and approval lineage, which are separate subjects from the record of a single decision."},{"claimKey":"not-accuracy","statement":"A receipt does not evidence accuracy. It binds the context that was supplied, and nothing in the record establishes that the inputs described the world correctly.","qualification":"Binding the supplied context is still useful: it fixes what was claimed before the outcome was known. It is not a statement about the truth of those claims."},{"claimKey":"not-model-behaviour","statement":"Where a model produced a recommendation upstream of a governed decision, the receipt evidences the decision, not the model. It carries no account of how the model reached its output or how it behaves on any other input.","qualification":"This is the model-reasoning boundary. It sits alongside the documented non-goal that MeshQu is not an explainability tool."},{"claimKey":"not-correctness","statement":"Verification proves issuance and integrity, never correctness. A passing verdict means the bytes are mathematically consistent and were signed by the key they claim. It does not mean the decision was right, the inputs truthful, or any external requirement discharged.","qualification":"Stated here in the same words the limits-of-verification entry uses, deliberately, so the two entries cannot drift into two versions of one fact."},{"claimKey":"commitment-shapes","statement":"Responsible-AI commitments come in different shapes. Some are statements of intent describing a disposition. Some can be evidenced at execution time, because a record can be produced showing the claim held for a specific decision. Reaching for a decision-time record to support a commitment of the first kind is a category error.","qualification":"The documentation is explicit that a commitment which cannot be evidenced at decision time is not thereby a weaker commitment. It is a different claim."}],"statementKind":"product-description","availability":"not-applicable","evidenceStrength":"source-reported","publicSources":[{"title":"MeshQu docs - Responsible-AI evidence","url":"https://docs.meshqu.com/concepts/responsible-ai-evidence","context":"The documentation owner's account of which responsible-AI commitments a decision record can and cannot evidence. Every claim on this entry is quoted from it."},{"title":"MeshQu docs - Concepts overview","url":"https://docs.meshqu.com/concepts/overview","context":"The explicit non-goal that MeshQu is not an explainability tool, which is the model-reasoning boundary stated from the product side."},{"title":"MeshQu docs - Actor attribution","url":"https://docs.meshqu.com/guides/actor-attribution","context":"Why the accountability commitment is evidenced only partly: the actor identifier is bound but not authenticated."}],"revision":"c9b66f70a2c2b5f39a937b724ad230fa01c101d2ffa386d232cc33807322c255","updatedAt":"2026-09-11T13:38:32.299Z","canonicalUrl":null,"related":[{"key":"limits-of-verification","url":"https://www.meshqu.com/knowledge/limits-of-verification.json"},{"key":"actor-identity","url":"https://www.meshqu.com/knowledge/actor-identity.json"},{"key":"what-meshqu-is-not","url":"https://www.meshqu.com/knowledge/what-meshqu-is-not.json"},{"key":"decision-receipts","url":"https://www.meshqu.com/knowledge/decision-receipts.json"}]}}