Stakeless Immunity: A Standing–Control Separation for AI-Produced Professional Judgment

Abstract

Transparency and standing are two different things, and professional reliance was always built on the second. When an auditor, an independent expert, or a rating analyst signs a conclusion that others act on, what entitles the reliance is not that the reasoning could be inspected — it is that a disciplined producer, one with a licence to lose, reputational capital staked, liability that bites, formed under an oversight regime, stood behind it. When an AI produces the conclusion, that standing is vacated at the producing node while a signature keeps liability formally in place. The natural hope is that making the AI fully transparent and reconstructable repairs the loss. This formal companion shows it does not, and locates exactly why: transparency adds access, the missing thing is standing, and these lie on different axes. We model warranted reliance as a weakly increasing functional D(S, k; χ) of producer-stake S, owner-access k, and consequence-bearing conferral χ, against an entitlement-to-rely bar τ. The contribution is a diagnostic framework and one reusable tool — an antecedent, falsifiable closure-rule key that decides when a conclusion-class carries a transparency-proof standing residue, exhibited across four professional domains (fairness opinions, audit, ratings, due diligence). Within it the warrant deficit splits into a control component access-transparency strictly eases and a standing component it leaves invariant (Theorem 1). Against the sanction-based toolkit the paper supplies one general baseline result plus one conditional, domain-testable failure mode. Generally, every deterrence / gatekeeper-liability / observability lever enters as a product π·S, so at a stakeless producer (S = 0, χ = 0) each is zero for any detection probability (Theorem 2). Separately — and without the institutional reading of τ — a fault-taxonomy-dependent instrument, commonly implemented by pricing a validated fault-incidence rate, cannot be sized on faults outside its reference taxonomy; an aggregate-outcome-triggered instrument remains available and fails to discipline the residual only where the residual signal is non-contractible or no feasible producer action moves its distribution. Access cannot reach a residue that does not lie on the access axis; it closes only by restoring standing, as producer-stake or as a consequence-bearing conferral — the remedy, not transparency.