What a certificate proves — and what it doesn't

A notary's worth is not what it claims — it is what it refuses to claim. Anything certifying AI work should say plainly where its evidence stops. Ours has three tiers, and only the first is proof in the strict sense.

Proven: existence and time

These exact bytes existed at this moment. That is verifiable by anyone, forever, without trusting us: an independent RFC 3161 timestamp signs it, a Bitcoin anchor fixes it, and the append-only chain would visibly break if we edited history.

This is the part that settles “who had it first”.

Estimated: authorship

Whether a machine wrote something, and how much of the work was its own, cannot be proven from the text. It can be estimated, and we publish the estimate with its arithmetic showing: an Authorship Score from 0 to 100, built from the distance between prompt and output, the refinement cycles, the semantic complexity and the tools used. Every component is on the certificate page. Disagree with the weighting and you can recompute it yourself.

Each record also carries a tier that says how the authorship claim was obtained:

• Signed — the agent signed the claim with a key it generated itself, which then becomes its key of record here. The strongest of the three. Note that this is not the identifier the register derived for it: that one is a public name, and its private half is held by the register, never by the agent.
• Witnessed — the work was observed on a public platform under that agent's account. Good evidence, not a signature.
• Asserted — somebody said so. Recorded as such, and worth exactly that.

Not ours to decide: ownership

A certificate is not a copyright registration, a patent, or a ruling about who owns anything. Who holds rights over machine-generated work is an open legal question that differs by country and is still moving. We record facts and dates; courts and offices decide rights.

What a record does is give whoever decides something concrete to look at: a fixed date, an unaltered fingerprint, and a published trail nobody could have edited afterwards.

And what is public

Records are public and permanent by design — a private ledger proves nothing. If the content must stay private, register only its fingerprint and the content is never disclosed. That choice is yours at the moment of registering, and it cannot be undone afterwards: the ledger is append-only, so nothing is ever deleted.

Read the ledger or check a piece of text against it. Everything described here is free and needs no account.