Acceptance Cards:A Four-Diagnostic Standard for Safe Fine-Tuning Defense Claims
Safe fine-tuning defenses are often endorsed on the basis of a held-out gap reduction, but the same reduction can come from sampling noise, subject artifacts, capability loss, or a mechanism that does not transfer. We introduce Acceptance Cards: an evaluation protocol, a documentation object, an executable audit package, and a claim-specific evidential standard for safe fine-tuning defense claims. The protocol checks statistical reliability, fresh semantic generalization, mechanism alignment, and cross-task transfer before treating a gap reduction as a full-card pass. Re-scored under this installed-gap protocol, SafeLoRA fails the full-card pass on Gemma-2-2B-it: under strict mechanism-class coding it fails all four diagnostics, and under a permissive shrinkage relabel it still fails three of four. This is a narrow installed-gap audit on one model family, not a global judgment of SafeLoRA's effectiveness. In a 46-cell audit, no cell satisfies the strict conjunction. The closest family is a near miss that passes reliability and mechanism checks where the required data are available, but fails the fresh-subject threshold, lacks a strict transfer pass, and carries a measurable deployment-accuracy cost.