Law 50 · Trust & Coordination
Preserve Provenance
Don't lose where a fact came from.
The principle
When findings get summarized and re-summarized, the claim survives but its source, its date, and its uncertainty quietly drop away, until you're holding an assertion you can't verify or defend. Two sources disagreeing isn't noise to flatten. It's signal to keep. A fact without its provenance is just a rumor that carries itself well.
Why it happens
Summaries preserve claims more easily than they preserve trust. Source, date, uncertainty, and disagreement are the first things to disappear. After a few hops, a hedged finding can become a flat assertion that looks as confident as a verified fact. Grounded-generation work treats attribution as measurable for this reason: claims should trace back to supporting sources. Carry the whole tuple - claim, source, date, confidence - through every step. When sources conflict, keep both sides attributed. The disagreement is reliability signal, not noise to smooth away.
Watch for
- A final report states a figure or claim with no source, date, or confidence attached.
- Two sources that disagreed upstream have silently become a single confident number downstream.
- You cannot trace a claim in the output back to the specific document it came from.
In practice
A research agent reads a 2021 blog post and a 2024 official filing, summarizes both into 'revenue is around $40M', and three hops of re-summarization later your final report states that figure as flat fact with no date, no source, and no hint that the two inputs actually disagreed. A claim without provenance is a rumor with good posture: you cannot defend it, audit it, or weigh it. Carry the full tuple through every transformation, claim plus source plus date plus confidence, and when sources conflict, keep both with attribution instead of silently crowning a winner. The disagreement is signal, not noise to flatten away.
Apply it
- Carry claim, source, date, and confidence together through every summarization and transformation step.
- When sources conflict, keep both values with their attributions instead of silently picking a winner.
- Require that every claim in the final output be traceable back to a specific supporting source.
The takeaway
Carry the attribution through every transformation: claim, source, date, and confidence. Keep conflicts with both sides attributed instead of quietly picking a winner, so whoever's downstream can audit it, weigh it, and trust it.