It’s neither signed or verified, though. There’s a signature involved, but that signature is over a JWT not over the package.
(There’s an overlaid thing called “attestations” on PyPI, which is a form of signing. But Trusted Publishing itself isn’t signing.)
Re signed - that is a fair point, although it raises the question, why is the distributed artifact not cryptographically authenticated?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I thought the whole point of the exercise was to avoid token compromise. Framed another way that means the goal is authentication of the CI/CD pipeline itself, right? Wouldn't signing a fingerprint be the default solution for that?
Unless there's some reason to hide the build source from downstream users of the package?
Re verified, doesn't this qualify as verifying that the source of the artifact is the expected CI/CD pipeline? I suppose "authenticated publishing" could also work for the same reason.