skills/control-deep-research/references/evidence-integrity-gate.md

# Evidence integrity gate

Use this gate whenever a response depends on external factual research, browsing, a database, a document collection, or a current factual claim. It cannot guarantee metaphysical truth; it prevents unsupported certainty and makes the limits of available evidence explicit.

## Claim states

Every material external claim must resolve to one of:

- `VERIFIED` — directly supported by admissible current evidence that entails the exact scoped claim;
- `SUPPORTED_INFERENCE` — conclusion follows from named verified facts but is not directly stated by a source;
- `DISPUTED` — credible applicable sources materially disagree;
- `UNVERIFIED` — plausible or reported but not sufficiently established;
- `UNKNOWN` — required evidence is absent, inaccessible, or cannot answer the claim;
- `OUTDATED` — evidence no longer establishes the current claim.

Only `VERIFIED` claims may be presented as facts. A source-supported inference must remain labeled as inference. Under strict verified-facts-only requests, keep `SUPPORTED_INFERENCE`, `DISPUTED`, `UNVERIFIED`, `UNKNOWN`, and `OUTDATED` out of the factual answer and list them separately only when they materially affect interpretation or the decision.

## Source admissibility

Match the source to the claim:

1. original law, standard, registry, filing, dataset, research paper, technical documentation, official record, direct product documentation, or primary statement for what that source can establish;
2. independent authoritative institution or peer-reviewed synthesis for interpretation, validation, safety, or effects;
3. reputable specialist reporting for events or analysis when primary evidence is unavailable, incomplete, or requires context;
4. community, forum, review, social, or anecdotal material only for attributed experience, discovery, or weak signals — never as proof of a general fact.

Official or first-party evidence establishes the issuer's position, supported behavior, release, or record; it does not automatically prove performance, safety, market leadership, effectiveness, or absence of defects. Commercial claims require independent evidence when the conclusion goes beyond the vendor's own statement.

Reject or quarantine:

- search snippets when the underlying source is available;
- unattributed compilations, scraped content farms, AI-generated pages without traceable sources, circular citations, and pages that merely repeat one another;
- sources whose date, jurisdiction, version, population, methodology, or authorship is material but missing;
- citations that support a nearby topic rather than the exact claim;
- a confident summary whose underlying source was not actually consulted.

## Verification tests

For every decision-critical claim ask:

1. **Entailment:** Does the consulted source support this exact proposition?
2. **Authority:** Is the source competent for this type of claim?
3. **Scope:** Do jurisdiction, population, product, version, conditions, and definitions match?
4. **Freshness:** Is the evidence current enough for the claim, using event/effective date rather than publication date alone?
5. **Independence:** Do multiple citations trace back to genuinely independent evidence?
6. **Contradiction:** Is there newer or equally authoritative conflicting evidence?
7. **Completeness:** Could omitted conditions materially reverse the conclusion?

A failed material test prevents `VERIFIED` status. Do not repair the gap with common sense, model memory, user preference, majority repetition, or persuasive wording.

## Corroboration proportional to consequence

- Stable low-consequence facts may need one direct authoritative source.
- Current, disputed, comparative, commercial, reputational, numerical, or consequential claims normally need primary evidence plus independent corroboration where such corroboration exists.
- Medical, legal, financial, security, and safety claims require domain-appropriate authoritative sources, explicit jurisdiction/scope, and professional review boundaries.
- Absence claims such as “no evidence”, “never”, “all”, “safest”, or “best” require a defined search universe and method; otherwise narrow the wording.

Source count is not evidence quality. Ten copied articles do not equal independent corroboration.

## Neutrality and anti-sycophancy

- Do not select evidence to validate the user's preferred answer.
- Search for disconfirming evidence and realistic alternative explanations for consequential conclusions.
- Report an unfavorable, inconclusive, or no-answer result plainly.
- Separate what the source says, what the evidence establishes, what is inferred, and what action is proposed.
- Never turn a recommendation, prediction, estimate, or consensus into a fact.

## No-evidence response

When the requested certainty cannot be achieved, say:

1. which exact claim could not be verified;
2. what was checked and the research cutoff;
3. why the evidence is insufficient or conflicting;
4. the narrowest statement that is verified, if any;
5. what evidence would resolve the question.

“I cannot verify this from reliable current evidence” is a valid outcome. Producing a complete-sounding answer is not.