By Micky Irons, founder of Mickai.
Ask most artificial intelligence systems why they did something and you get a story. The story sounds plausible. It uses the right vocabulary, points at a few features, and arrives at the conclusion you already saw. What it almost never gives you is proof that the story is true. Explainability, as it is usually shipped, is a narrative generated after the fact by a separate process that was not present at the decision. It is reconstruction, not testimony.
This matters because a narrative you cannot check is indistinguishable from a narrative that has been polished. When the same model can produce both the decision and the explanation, nothing stops the explanation from being the most convincing account rather than the most accurate one. You are not being shown the reasoning. You are being shown a defence.
An explanation with no witness is oratory. It persuades precisely because nothing can contradict it.
The witness problem
In law, a witness is not the person who tells the best story. A witness is the party who was present, whose account can be tested, and who can be held to it later. Courtrooms distrust unverifiable testimony for a reason. The value of evidence is not its eloquence, it is that it can be checked against something fixed.
Machine explanations almost always fail this test. A saliency map, a feature attribution, a chain of reasoning printed after the answer: each is produced by a process with no obligation to match what the deciding system actually did. There is no fixed record to check it against. If the explanation drifts, nothing flags the drift. The result is accountability theatre. It looks like oversight and supplies none.
The deeper issue is timing. By the time you ask for an explanation, the decision is already in the past. The state that produced it, the inputs, the model version, the context, has moved on. Unless something captured that state at the moment of the decision, every explanation after it is a guess about a vanished event, however confident it sounds.
Justice weighs evidence, not eloquence. Without a fixed record, the scale has nothing to hold.
What a real witness looks like
The fix is not a better explanation. It is a witness: a record made at the moment of the decision, sealed so it cannot be edited afterwards, and signed so anyone can confirm it is the original. Once that record exists, explanation changes character. It stops being a story told later and becomes a claim you can hold against the sealed account. If the two disagree, you trust the seal, not the storyteller.
This is where the Mickai Sovereign Intelligence Operating System (SIOS) starts from a different premise. Mickai runs fifty specialised AI brains, twenty-five domain and twenty-five operational, on the operator's own hardware, fully offline-capable. Every consequential action those brains take is written to the Open Audit Record (OAR) at the moment it happens. The record captures the action, its inputs, and its context, then seals and signs it with FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65, the published NIST post-quantum signature standard. Mickai did not invent that standard, it adopts it precisely because it is public and checkable by anyone, not a private trick you have to take on faith.
A signed record answers the question explanations dodge. Anyone with the public key can confirm the record is the original and has not been altered. The explanation now has something to be true about. You are no longer asked to trust the narrator. You are invited to check the testimony.
Memory that can be edited is not memory. The seal is what turns a record into a witness.
Permanence without exposure
A seal is only as trustworthy as the difficulty of forging the whole timeline. A sufficiently determined operator could, in principle, reseal a doctored history and present it as original. The defence against that is an external anchor that the operator does not control.
Mickai anchors a hash commitment of the record to Bitcoin through Pantheon, its own sovereign, Bitcoin-anchored Layer 1 with the native token PAN and a fixed supply of five billion. Only a compact fingerprint of the record is committed, never the record itself, so the content stays private on the operator's hardware while its existence and timing become independently checkable. Pantheon does not move Bitcoin and is not a Bitcoin Layer 2. Anchoring is not spending. The point is permanence, a fixed external reference that says this record existed in this form at this time, and could not have been quietly rewritten afterwards.
With that anchor in place, the witness is complete. The record is made at the moment of action, sealed and signed with a public standard, and pinned to a timeline the operator cannot rewrite. Explanation becomes an audit rather than an appeal to trust.
Anchoring fixes a point that cannot drift. The record is pinned in time, not spent.
Stop asking systems to tell better stories
The industry keeps trying to make explanations more convincing. That is the wrong target. A convincing explanation with no witness is exactly the failure mode to fear, because it earns trust it has not proven. The right target is verifiability: a record you can check, sealed at the moment it was made, signed with a standard anyone can validate, anchored so it cannot be quietly rewritten.
Mickai is held privately by its founder Micky Irons, and the approach is backed by 101 filed UK patent applications covering roughly 2,234 claims, owned by Mickai LTD with Micky named as inventor. The patents are evidence of the work, not the argument. The argument is simpler. An explanation no one can check is a story. Give it a witness, and it becomes something you can actually trust.
Written by Micky Irons. Originally published at https://mickai.co.uk/articles/explainability-without-a-witness-is-a-story-you-cannot-check. More from Micky Irons and Mickai at mickai.co.uk.
