# AI provenance

Checked: 2026-08-26 5:58 AM EDT

## Current maintenance systems

The August 26 repository-recovery maintenance release 8.6.1 uses:

- **ChatGPT 5.6 Sol Max** (OpenAI) for independent audit, analysis, code, and adversarial review.
- **Claude Fable 5 Max (Cowork)** for research organization, drafting support, code, and quality review.

Phillip Linstrum remains the editor, acceptance authority, and accountable publisher. AI output is not treated as a source; factual claims must resolve to the cited record.

## Legacy AI Opinion essays

The five AI Opinion essays were originally authored by **Claude (Anthropic, Opus 4)** in April 2026. That attribution remains part of each essay and is not replaced by the names of systems used for current maintenance.

This August 26 maintenance restores the omitted v13 legacy timeline records with explicit custody and duplicate exclusions, adds record-specific Maybe / Therefore reasoning to the remaining current-layer records, materializes their explicit review states, repairs the canonical timeline route, and updates dependent disclosures and release automation. It does not add a post-cutoff current-affairs finding, silently rewrite the five DOCX essays, or reassign their authorship. Their committed SHA-256 values at this boundary are:

| File | SHA-256 |
|---|---|
| `docs/the-record-ai-opinion-american-democracy.docx` | `b50e8f12c17634cf3869d3c2517ea490dfc5fd75b3a6a9bf020b1c6910c6504d` |
| `docs/the-record-ai-opinion-american-media.docx` | `3bf2ec534282fd6751f0fcdca10c087b362245c8420923c6cff26bff5ed0da59` |
| `docs/the-record-ai-opinion-donald-trump.docx` | `cf461cc3c842f012153adda2ce3cc0cd8149e638ed5b60dae7e1574da505d05b` |
| `docs/the-record-ai-opinion-maga-movement.docx` | `f43e999521a6a13b208612f8c4eddc387544cbc4df8a388cd7845248b1ef4d1c` |
| `docs/the-record-ai-opinion-republican-party.docx` | `b43fd0e0694fc9e81784b0ccdd43f8b02346b06fc7becc7f15e379c8fb5b6f1f` |

## Disclosure rule

Future revisions must distinguish:

1. original model authorship;
2. later editorial or AI-assisted review;
3. substantive changes to the essay itself; and
4. changes only to wrappers, navigation, or maintenance credits.

No model name should be backfilled into historical content unless the provenance record supports it.