Conformance as a Distribution: Delegation Contracts, Error Budgets, and the Allocation of Evaluation Authority in Use-Based AI Regulation

arXiv:2610.33112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Use-based AI regulation assigns obligations by deployment risk but lacks an evidentiary object to carry them. A benchmark score is a property of a model; conformance of a deployment is a failure rate under a declared distribution of contexts, bounded by a scope and subject to expiry. We take the delegation contract of earlier work (frozen configuration, scoped claim, executable revision rule) and study it under strategic play between a deployer, an auditor, and an enforcement point. We ask whether a declared context mixture can be made truthful; whether an audit can be unbiased against a system that detects evaluation traffic; whether a certification error budget can sustain a long-lived deployment; whether an aggregate audit can support a per-subgroup guarantee; and whether an incident metric that counts system failures but not fallback costs ranks arrangements correctly. For each we give a mechanism and a proposition: a proper-scoring penalty on the declared mixture bounds the excess failure of a best-responding deployer by $O(\lambda^{-1/2})$ in the penalty weight; a commit-reveal audit drawn from live traffic is unbiased by construction and grades the evaluator with the same sample; a halving error budget drives certification coverage below $(1-p)^n$ while $\alpha$-investing sustains it under a marginal false-certification guarantee; a per-subgroup guarantee costs audit size scaling as $1/m$ in subgroup mass; and any failure-only incident metric prefers withdrawal at every fallback cost, even when total loss ranks the arrangements oppositely. Five preregistered synthetic studies test each claim; no language model or production system is evaluated. Enforcement sits at distribution, capability-access, monetization and risk-transfer choke points, expiry of the conformance record is a standard of care, and conformance-as-a-rate is set against the EU AI Act's static conformity assessment.