 The key idea here is that when you get testimony from an authority that p, the authority’s testimony is now the only reason that you have for believing p, i.e., any other reasons you may have had are now preempted in the sense that they no longer count for or against p. Proponents of the Preemptive Account, then, explain the difference between authoritative and non-authoritative testimony as follows: Authoritative testimony can provide you with a preemptive reason for belief, whereas non-authoritative testimony cannot. For defenses of various versions of the Preemptive Account, see Zagzebski (2012, 2014, 2016), Keren (2007, 2014a, 2014b), Croce (2018) and Constantin and Grundmann (2020). See Anderson (2014), Dougherty (2014), Jäger (2016), Dormandy (2018), and Lackey (2018a) for some worries with this view.