Quantifying Model Uniqueness in Heterogeneous AI Ecosystems

As AI systems evolve from isolated predictors into complex, heterogeneous ecosystems of foundation models and specialized adapters, distinguishing genuine behavioral novelty from functional redundancy becomes a critical governance challenge. Here, we introduce a statistical framework for auditing model uniqueness based on In-Silico Quasi-Experimental Design (ISQED). By enforcing matched interventions across models, we isolate intrinsic model identity and quantify uniqueness as the Peer-Inexpressible Residual (PIER), i.e. the component of a target's behavior strictly irreducible to any stochastic convex combination of its peers, with vanishing PIER characterizing when such a routing-based substitution becomes possible. We establish the theoretical foundations of ecosystem auditing through three key contributions. First, we prove a fundamental limitation of observational logs: uniqueness is mathematically non-identifiable without intervention control. Second, we derive a scaling law for active auditing, showing that our adaptive query protocol achieves minimax-optimal sample efficiency (dσ2γ-2log(Nd/δ)). Third, we demonstrate that cooperative game-theoretic methods, such as Shapley values, fundamentally fail to detect redundancy. We implement this framework via the DISCO (Design-Integrated Synthetic Control) estimator and deploy it across diverse ecosystems, including computer vision models (ResNet/ConvNeXt/ViT), large language models (BERT/RoBERTa), and city-scale traffic forecasters. These results move trustworthy AI beyond explaining single models: they establish a principled, intervention-based science of auditing and governing heterogeneous model ecosystems.