Journal article
A Second Model Is Not a Second Opinion: Peer Verification, Correlated Failure, and the Independence Variable Nobody Reports
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. When a language model cannot reliably detect its own errors, the standard remedy is to have a second model check the first. That substitution is now the default across agent benchmarks, reward pipelines and safety evaluations, and it rests on…