Who Analyses the Analyser? Self-Validating LLM Hazard Analysis with Constitutional Meta-STPA
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted to draft the artifacts of safety analysis such as, losses, hazards, Unsafe Control Actions (UCAs), and safety constraints, inside rigorous processes such as Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). Yet a blind spot runs through this fast-growing literature: every system gets analysed except the LLM-assisted tool doing the analysing, which is itself a safety-relevant system that can hallucinate standards, emit unverifiable constraints, and leave no audit trail from prompt to artifact. We take seriously the question the field has skipped -- who analyses the analyser? and answer it by turning STPA on the tool itself. We present Constitutional Meta-STPA, an LLM-assisted STPA tool built around a closed loop: the tool runs a meta-STPA of the class of AI-assisted safety tools and derives rather than asserts, its governance constitution from the resulting loss→hazard→UCA→constraint chain, yielding a published constitution of 21 Tool Principles and 8 Meta-Safety Principles, each bound to a code enforcement point. We formalise the measured object as a constitution-marginal coverage operator over a principle set P (|P|=29) with a soundness lemma that isolates coverage from model and scanner, and report four findings. (i)~Self-derivation: a frontier ensemble (claude-opus-4.8+claude-sonnet-4) recovers 18/21 canonical and all 8/8 governance principles from the tool's own design, while a weaker pair recovers 12/21 and 3/8, so the meta layer is model-limited, not constitution-limited, and the same 8/8 re-emerge from a second, independently authored tool.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 11 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.
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References · 11
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
- 2021On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelscited by 3,961
- 2023Safety Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Case Study of STPA using ChatGPTcited by 13
- 2023Can Large Language Models assist in Hazard Analysis?cited by 8
- 2024Welcome Your New AI Teammate: On Safety Analysis by Leashing Large Language Modelscited by 8
- 2025From Hazard Identification to Controller Design: Proactive and LLM-Supported Safety Engineering for ML-Powered Systemscited by 7
- 2025An LLM-Integrated Framework for Completion, Management, and Tracing of STPAcited by 2
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