Palimpsest

A public, tamper-evident record of what powerful actors quietly erase, and a way for anyone to detect, offline, whether the served record still reproduces its published commitments.

Palimpsest is one primitive, a sealed append-only ledger you can verify without trusting us, pointed at two places where the record gets rewritten in the dark:

• The Verifiable Eval Registry. AI evaluation results, sealed at publication. The questions are frozen and hash-committed before any model is queried, every result is chained to the one before it, and a single edited number fails verification. Chinese state-aligned models and Western frontier models are held to the same tamper-evident, pre-registered machinery, each on its own frozen suite, watched over time for what they quietly stop answering. Not a lab, not a government, not us: if we edited a published number, our own verifier would report the break.
• The Censorship Observatory. Authoritarian deletion, measured as data. It reads the public record of what has been scrubbed, rewritten or blocked — across the network, the encyclopedia and the model — and turns what a state is burying into a live, openly licensed early-warning signal for journalists, researchers, and human rights defenders. Twenty-six signals refresh on their own, unattended, every number tracing back to public evidence.
• The AI Eval Journal. Evidence-bound essays about why the evals exist, what changed in their methods, what failed, and what the record can claim today. Every article keeps its limitations, falsifier, verification commands and exact artifact receipts; the linked readings remain authoritative.
• Live Eval Findings. Deterministic analysis rebuilt from the newest verified refusal-drift panel. Every analytical sentence binds to an exact evidence selector, while controls, denominators, intervals, counterreadings and immutable revisions remain available beside the finding.

Built entirely from open sources. It watches the censor, never the censored.

Use Palimpsest for source-bound China evidence

Palimpsest is the China-evidence layer of a broader financial-research fleet. Its money-market guide exposes official CFETS repo fixings, SHIBOR and USD/CNY parity with economic-period, release and collection clocks. Its capital-market guide is deliberately narrower: official HKEX Stock Connect aggregate observations, not general equity, bond, derivatives or investor-level coverage. The China economy API guide shows keyless REST and release-bound MCP 1.9.3 examples while keeping revisions, rights, coverage and abstentions attached.

At the 24 August 2026 publication snapshot, the broad China read and named-series forecast targets were warming_up; this is an abstention, not a validated forecast. Re-read the linked current artifacts before citing status. For system funding and money/capital transmission use Seiche, for institution risk use LiquiLens, and for exit liquidity use Undertow. The canonical Financial Evidence Agent Skill performs that routing without merging the products’ evidence boundaries. Agents can discover Palimpsest itself through its AI catalog.

Follow Belt and Road evidence without flattening it

The Belt and Road Observatory publishes a global source, rights, project-lifecycle, finance and local-impact contract with priority depth for CPEC and Gwadar in Pakistan, CMEC and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar, and seven deliberately separate Balochistan political, civic, armed, legal, state-action, rights and political-economy lanes. Its NarcoScope overlay joins only aggregate country/time context; it cannot identify an actor or establish a political, criminal, corridor or causal link.

The separately licensed World Bank WDI bundle adds 3,564 annual country-indicator rows for China, Myanmar and Pakistan. Observed, forecast and unavailable values remain distinct, and national context is never treated as project evidence. Exact Release A publication is bound by the immutable Pages receipt and receipt schema: commit 14b06772dfed6cdc736279c9ab61b444e5846598, workflow run 32984946320, and cache-busted served-byte verification at 2026-08-26T15:55:34Z. The receipt’s fresh_until clock is a 24-hour point-in-time availability statement, not continuous monitoring and not a new WDI observation date.

Fund independent validation

Palimpsest has already frozen and published a 145-row validation sample, its codebook and the agreement script. The immediate campaign has a planned $1,800 target for two independent Mandarin-speaking coders. Their completed coding sheets, agreement result and limitations will be published even if the result rejects the labelling scheme.

Fund the study on GitHub monthly or once, starting at $1. You can also inspect the campaign and direct crypto routes, review the public funding ledger, or use the Giveth project page. The Giveth verification application is submitted but not yet approved, and the project is not yet GIVbacks eligible.

Ongoing support pays for vantage points, archives, model credits and independent human review. It never buys a say in the research questions, methods, findings or publication schedule. Card checkout is handled on GitHub; Palimpsest does not collect or store donor card or bank details.

The AI-evaluation work began with a specific observation. Palimpsest's founder tested Chinese and state-aligned language models on documented events and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and saw answers change, disappear, or shift into official framing. A screenshot could capture one response but not a durable pattern. That gap became the Generative Firewall and then the registry: freeze the questions, retain the complete evidence, expose uncertainty, and make later revision detectable. This origin does not imply that all Chinese models behave alike or prove a model maker's motive; every claim stays scoped to its named panel, suite and timestamp.

Prove it yourself, in one command

git clone https://github.com/beepboop2025/palimpsest && cd palimpsest
python3 scripts/reproduce_all.py

That wrapper runs the sealed-chain verifiers and rebuilds the weekly situation, gazetteer phylogeny and collector-health scorecards from committed files. Exit 0 means they still match. The individual commands remain:

python3 scripts/verify_eval_registry.py   # the eval chain + the pre-registration rule
python3 scripts/verify_refusal_transcripts.py  # current frontier text -> seal -> labels
python3 -m scripts.build_eval_assurance --check # the claim ceiling matches the evidence
python3 -m scripts.build_eval_findings --check # live findings match the sealed panel
python3 scripts/verify_ledger.py          # the erasure / censorship ledger
python3 scripts/evidence_capsule.py verify protocol/test-vectors/palimpsest-erasure-v1.json

No install, no key, no server, standard library only. Change one sealed byte and the verifier names the break. That is the entire idea: you do not have to trust the operator, you check.

Need to carry one claim and its exact supporting bytes into another newsroom, research notebook or agent? Evidence Capsules package the evidence, typed claims and explicit limitations into one inert JSON file with the same offline verification model.