@tao@mathstodon.xyz If everyone plays nice, a protocol is enforced by conscience and social norms. When they don't, the best solution via social norms is litigation, which I suspect a research community would dislike more than the general public. Given that there is a canonical representation of a proof, however, it may lead to well-defined 'attribution problem' where there is some notion of "value/criticality" for the various components of a proof in its canonical representation. Attribution is then settled using this "proof-data-structure" and the git-repo submitted to the "attribution engine" for review. AI agents can do proof-work according to the protocol you outline as well, and use the "attribution-engine". The little bandwidth a research community has for litigation can then be used just to guard against the xkcd'esque future where counterproductive proof-work results from gaming the attribution system. This is all assuming that the "proof-content" matters more than whether/not it was AI generated. I'm not entirely convinced that this assumption is valid.