Notes on facts & origin.
Short pieces on AI-first political research, provenance, and why the record beats the rumor.
From the Printing Press to the Prove-It Button
Print gave facts a physical origin. Digital took it away. We have been able to sign facts for 30 years, but AI is the first partner that will actually verify them. Today we start with what we can do.
Read →The Prove-It Button: A Browser-Verifiable, Passport-and-Hardware-Anchored Proof of Origin
A working system: a public document signed by a real US passport and a phone secure element, verifiable by anyone in a browser or an AI, with a trust chain pinned in an open-source verifier and hardened across five red-team rounds.
Read →Safety Without Origin
AI is careful about safety. But safety without origin is just a filter. We tested four free AIs and none could find a single actual Congressional vote.
Read →Trust by reputation, or trust by origin — who gets to be a source for AI?
Why "only trust verified sites" quietly hands the supply of truth to a few incumbents — and how signed origin breaks the gate. Even the AI data feeds serving facts today are unsigned: nobody has done the work.
Read →Facts recorded yesterday — not a model’s nine-month-old memory
Why political research should run on the dated public record — not an LLM’s training data or social-media noise.
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