Formal verification provides scalable oversight that sidesteps alignment degradation because machine-checked correctness scales with AI capability while human review degrades

Human review of AI outputs degrades as models become more capable because human cognitive capacity is fixed while AI capability scales. Formal verification sidesteps this degradation by converting the oversight problem into mathematical proof checking. Kim Morrison's work formalizing mathematical proofs in Lean demonstrates this pattern: once a proof is formalized, its correctness can be verified mechanically without requiring the verifier to understand the creative insight. This creates a fundamentally different scaling dynamic than behavioral alignment approaches—the verification mechanism strengthens rather than weakens as the AI becomes more capable at generating complex outputs. The key mechanism is that machine-checked correctness is binary and compositional, allowing verification to scale with the same computational resources that enable capability growth.