Builder, Defender, Breaker: Measurable Independence and Bounded Autonomy When Generative Models Build, Defend and Test Software — Paper

Abstract

-cross Abstract: Generative models now write application code, harden and monitor it, and probe it for exploitable flaws, so that one family of models increasingly plays builder, defender and breaker at once. The prevailing view treats full autonomy as the natural end point of assistance. This article argues for a narrower and more defensible position than a blanket requirement for human oversight. We define the shared generative substrate as the set of upstream dependencies (training corpus, model family, alignment procedure, vendor, toolchain) that induce correlated errors, and we define independence as a measurable property of pairs of lifecycle roles rather than an attribute of any participant. A coincident-failure model in the tradition of Eckhardt and Lee shows why organisational independence, the proxy on which verification standards have relied, no longer implies statistical independence once roles share a substrate; it also shows that heterogeneous models, deterministic analysers and formal verification can restore independence for the fault classes they cover. What remains for humans is specific: authority over the specification against which every machine oracle is judged, accountability that current governance instruments do not permit to be delegated, and last-resort authority to halt. We translate this into an operational framework with five autonomy levels, three distinct human roles and five decision criteria (consequence, reversibility, time-criticality, verifiability and adversarial exposure), apply it to build, defend and test actions, and specify how independence and oversight effectiveness can be measured. The central claims are stated as testable hypotheses with a protocol for refuting them.

Authors 1

Mohamed Chahine Ghanem

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2607.03215
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2607.03215
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.SE
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2607.03215
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CR
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

2 h ago

Conflicts

None

No models linked to this paper yet.

Authors: Mohamed Chahine Ghanem

As of

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Claim history · PDF

1 claims · 1 propertiesShow all properties

PDFpdf_url1

Claim history for PDF
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.03215	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperBuilder, Defender, Breaker: Measurable Independence and Bounded Autonomy When Generative Models Build, Defend and Test Software
New paper: Builder, Defender, Breaker: Measurable Independence and Bounded Autonomy When Generative Models Build, Defend and Test Software
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	40 min ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.