"Show Me You Comply... Without Showing Me Anything": Zero-Knowledge Software Auditing for AI-Enabled Systems

Classical software verification and validation techniques, such as procedural audits, formal methods, or model documentation, are the traditional mechanisms used to achieve the verifiable accountability now required by regulations like the EU AI Act. These methods are either expensive or heavily manual, and ill-suited for the opaque, "black box" nature of most Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. A conflict arises: high auditability and verifiability are required by law, but such transparency conflicts with the need to protect the assets being audited (e.g., confidential data and proprietary models). This paper introduces ZKMLOps, an acMLOps verification framework that operationalizes Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) within Machine-Learning Operations lifecycles; a ZKP allows a prover to convince a verifier that a statement is true without revealing any information about the statement itself. By integrating ZKP with established software engineering patterns, ZKMLOps provides a modular and repeatable process for generating verifiable cryptographic evidence-proofs of well-defined computational statements about the audited model and its inputs-that auditors can use as input to a regulatory compliance determination. We evaluate the framework along two dimensions. First, framework viability: orchestration overhead is bounded and stable across architecturally heterogeneous ZKP backends and models of increasing size. Second, cost-versus-assurance trade-offs: the audit-on-demand setting is the regime in which full zero-knowledge auditing is the appropriate tool, where it provides confidentiality and integrity guarantees that lighter-weight alternatives cannot match.