Deterministic Decision Verification and Proof-Gated Execution

This paper defines a structural category for systems that produce verifiable decisions rather than descriptive outputs. It argues that standard computational infrastructures—logs, traces, audit narratives, and explanatory models—fail to establish decision identity under replay and therefore cannot provide proof of a particular decision event. A distinct class of systems is characterized by four conditions: deterministic computation, canonical artifact identity, replay-exact verification, and execution gating based on independent verification. Under these conditions, a decision is not merely an output but a stable object whose identity can be reproduced and validated across contexts. The paper analyzes the limits of post hoc reconstruction, distinguishes verifiability from explanation, and formalizes proof-gated execution as a consequence of identity-preserving computation. It situates these systems relative to existing approaches in software verification, cryptographic commitment, and audit theory, and argues that they constitute a separate category of infrastructure with implications for trust, responsibility, and action in computational systems.