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Brief — 06 · Information Integrity

The Provenance Problem

When anything can be generated, origin becomes the scarce resource — and an infrastructure question.

Brief· 11 min· 2025-05

For most of history, the cost of fabricating a convincing document or recording was high enough to act as a rough filter. That filter is gone. The marginal cost of plausible synthetic content has fallen to nearly zero, and with it the default assumption that what we see bears some relationship to what happened.

The reflexive response is detection — building classifiers to spot fakes. We think detection is a losing arms race and that the durable answer is provenance: making origin verifiable rather than making fakery detectable. The question shifts from 'is this fake?' to 'where did this come from, and can I check?'

Provenance at internet scale is an infrastructure problem, not a product feature. It needs standards, adoption at the point of capture and publication, and institutions willing to stake their credibility on it. This brief lays out what that infrastructure looks like and why it has to be built as a commons rather than owned by whoever gets there first.

Next dispatch The Compute Settlement →