AI is pushing software into an industrial age, but formal verification infrastructure is still operating like a guild craft. For decades, formal verification thrived in university basements and research labs. We wrote arcane Rocq tactics, built bespoke proofs, and spoke in theorem provers few outsiders could understand. Verified systems are still rare, expensive, and mostly isolated from one another. Projects like DeepSpec recognized the problem early: formal verification produced islands of trust, not a connected trust infrastructure. The guild era must end. AI makes proof abundant; formal methods must make trust abundant. For that, we now have to build the infrastructure that makes trust composable: across provers, languages, compilers, hardware, and legacy systems. We do not need more isolated proofs. We need a connected trust stack for the AI age. I should be clear: The guild era was also a heroic era. Formal verification has achieved incredible feats. CompCert proved realistic optimizing compilers could be machine verified. seL4 showed kernels could carry end-to-end proofs. VST connected C verification to compiler semantics. HACL* demonstrated that high-performance cryptographic libraries could be both verified and practical. The problem is not failure. The problem is Formal Babel: a world where proof frameworks fail to communicate. Proofs compose inside carefully engineered ecosystems, but rarely across them. Even though VST builds on CompCert semantics, the field still contains dozens of incompatible formalizations of C semantics, memory models, concurrency semantics, and intermediate representations. Every prover and framework develops its own abstractions, proof id

Formal Verification Has Become Essential: Let's Solve the Last Bottlenecks
Santiago Cuéllar
2 min read


