AA_9 Simulation Worlds Benchmarks and the Impossibility of Standing via Evaluation Environments

This paper establishes a structural impossibility result concerning simulation worlds and evaluation environments: no artificial system can acquire standing through performance in benchmarks, simulated worlds, or testing environments. It proves that evaluation contexts—no matter how rich, adversarial, or realistic—cannot supply the conditions required for standing preservation under admissibility. The result is eliminative. The paper does not critique specific benchmarks, simulation platforms, or evaluation methodologies, nor does it propose improved testing regimes. Instead, it shows that standing cannot be generated, transferred, or approximated through evaluation, because evaluation environments necessarily substitute external scoring, observer-relative criteria, or task success for admissible reference fixation and identity continuity. The analysis blocks a class of claims in which success in simulated worlds, mastery of benchmarks, or robust performance across environments is taken to justify attributions of agency, understanding, responsibility, or governance relevance. It demonstrates that such attributions rely on epistemic surrogates—metrics, rewards, or scenario coverage—that preserve agreement while failing to preserve standing. This work is purely boundary-setting. It introduces no operational evaluation criteria, no governance mechanisms, and no enforcement logic. Its contribution is to delimit what simulation and benchmarking can legitimately establish, clarifying that evaluation environments can test performance but cannot ground standing or agency in artificial systems.