The OVERT conformance ladder for AI conformity assessment

AI conformity assessment usually stops at a questionnaire. OVERT replaces the questionnaire with a ladder of evidence — each rung makes a stronger, machine-checkable claim about what your AI actually did.

Tip

The normative requirements for each level live in the OVERT standard at overt.is. This page is the practical “how do I climb it” view.

The rungs

1. AAL-1 — Self-attestation. You declare your controls. Useful for internal alignment; not independently checkable. Most “AI governance” tooling stops here.

2. AAL-2 — Active enforcement. Controls actually run on the request path (deny-by-default tools, egress limits, PII checks). You can show enforcement is live, not just configured.

3. AAL-3 — Signed, operator-controlled proof. Every governed decision becomes an Ed25519-signed receipt over RFC 8785 canonical bytes, chained in an RFC 6962-shaped log. Tampering is detectable. The notary is co-resident with the operator, so this caps at AAL-3.

4. AAL-4 — Independent proof. The notary is operated outside the operator’s trust boundary, and a qualified, structurally independent assessor verifies the claim. This is the rung regulators and insurers can rely on.

What each rung needs

Rung	Enforcement	Attestation	Independence
AAL-1	declared	none required	none
AAL-2	active	optional	none
AAL-3	active	signed + chained	operator-controlled notary
AAL-4	active	signed + chained	notary + assessor independent of the operator

How Glacis products map to the ladder

• Declare your target level as code with OVERT-as-Code ([policy.overt_level] target = 3).
• Enforce + attest with the runtime product — honestly scoped to Level 1 Core / AAL-3 today (a single operator-controlled notary).
• Verify any receipt yourself with the verifier — independence of verification does not require trusting Glacis.

Honesty about AAL-4

Glacis’s hosted bundle is not independently certified and must not be represented as AAL-4. Reaching AAL-4 requires a notary outside your trust boundary and a qualified independent assessor — see the runtime product scope.