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prism-verify prism-verify

prism-verify Handbook

prism is a runtime verifier for agent workflows. It adjudicates an artifact — code, a tool-call, or a set of citations — against a stated intent, and returns one of four verdicts: accept, revise, refuse, or escalate, alongside a signed, replayable receipt.

The point of prism is that its verdict is trustworthy in a way a self-check is not. A model asked to grade its own output tends to pass it. prism removes that failure mode at the API contract, with four locks:

The four locks

Section titled “The four locks”
  1. Family-different. The caller declares its model family; prism selects a verifier from a different family by construction. There is no silent same-family fallback — if every alternate-family route is unavailable, prism refuses with VERIFIER_UNAVAILABLE rather than grade with the caller’s own family.
  2. Reasoning-stripped. The producer’s chain-of-thought, <thinking> blocks, and vendor reasoning summaries are stripped from the artifact before it crosses the family boundary. A manipulated trace is a known way to inflate a judge’s confidence; prism never shows it to the verifier, and re-parses the stripped artifact to confirm nothing survived.
  3. Multi-lens, submodularity-aware. At least three decorrelated lenses run in parallel (contract-completeness, cross-boundary information-flow, invariant/test-adequacy, groundedness). If the lenses agree too much — collapsing to one redundant signal — prism refuses with LENS_COLLAPSE, because a “multi-lens” claim that’s really one lens is fraudulent.
  4. Independently-verifiable receipts. Every verdict emits a replayable receipt. As of v0.4 receipts are signed with Ed25519, so a different tool can verify a prism receipt with prism’s public key — no shared secret.

Surfaces

Section titled “Surfaces”

The same engine is exposed three ways, with identical guarantees:

  • CLI — prism verify / replay / verify-receipt / keygen / pubkey / serve.
  • MCP server — verify + replay tools for an MCP host.
  • HTTP service — prism serve exposes POST /verify, GET /replay/{id}, POST /verify-receipt, GET /healthz, and OpenAPI docs.

Start with Getting started, then the HTTP service, Receipts & signing, or the full Reference. To run the citation check against a model you host, see the self-hosted groundedness verifier.