On the Impossibility of Observability-Based Authorization: A Formal Impossibility Result for Ex-Ante AI Governance

This technical note establishes a formal impossibility result for AI governance in regulated environments: no observability architecture can produce an artifact satisfying the ex-ante authorization requirement imposed by a regulatory regime. Under ex-ante regimes, each consequential action must be authorized prior to execution through a reproducible, independently verifiable decision over policy, context, and proposed action specification. The proof proceeds by three lemmas. First, observability signals are causally posterior to the governed system’s generation of the candidate action. Second, artifacts derived from observational characterization cannot be verified independently of the governed system. Third,…