What did the adversarial review of the ARC Theory find?
A commissioned adversarial review across ten frontier configurations attacked the precedence and found the components in earlier work, not the arrangement, which remains under test. Its verdict named the operationalisation as the strongest surviving claim; the review was commissioned by the programme and instructed to attack, so it is not external review.
The review was built to lose. Ten frontier configurations from six vendors were commissioned and instructed to attack the precedence claims, and they were brutal on the components. Its concessions are published on the synthesis and related-work pages rather than summarised there.
What it could not find was the join. No single earlier work joins all six elements, and it named the operationalisation as the strongest surviving claim and genuinely hard to anticipate. Even on that row a first is not asserted, and the reason is stated in the same place: the formal systematic search that would license the word has not been run.
The grade on the review itself is the part most summaries drop. It was commissioned by the programme and instructed to be hostile, so it is commissioned adversarial review and not external review, and this site never presents it as the latter. Three later structural claims post-date it and are recorded as unsearched rather than as firsts.
There is no peer review, and the papers say so wherever the question could arise. They are self-published on the Open Science Framework under DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB with code, data and stated falsification conditions. Open publication means anyone can inspect the work. Peer review means qualified strangers were obliged to. The first has happened and the second has not.