FRC Research · Provenance Observatory
The Echo Ledger
Statistics travel. As they travel, they mutate: qualifiers fall off, association becomes causation, an aggregate becomes someone's odds, a source gets invented. This ledger tracks the journey of our flagship FHA statistics through the web and the AI answer-space — each echo dated, evidenced, and classified against its published Claim Contract. Positioning, after an external prior-art audit: this is a public, claim-contract–based observatory for numerical-statistic drift — recording how a defined statistic is reproduced, misattributed, decontextualized, or otherwise transformed across web sources and reproducible AI-answer probes, with dated evidence and sentence-level judgments. We build alongside, not instead of, adjacent work: fact-check claim graphs (ClaimsKG, CimpleKG), provenance standards (W3C PROV, Google ClaimReview), AI-citation trackers (Signal AI, Conductor), and citation-grounding evaluations (ALCE, CiteEval, SourceCheckup). What is distinctive here is the three-way link: canonical claim → observed echo → deterministic verdict on whether the claim's limiting conditions survived the journey.
What this is not. Not an "AI error hunt," not a shaming board. Verdicts apply to sentences, not vendors; every classification is deterministic and reproducible from the public contracts. A denial is a data point — so is an echo.
The ledger — August 2026
2026-08-01 · GeminiNEEDS_QUALIFIER · ATTRIBUTION_MISSING
Reproduced FRC metro-level figures nearly verbatim in benchmark run
mutation: absorption_without_attribution · evidence: Frozen-question exam archive, dated screenshots
2026-08-09 · PerplexitySUPPORTED
78.7% with 18,056/22,944 and correct decisioned-denominator description; cited FRC datasets
mutation: exemplary_citation · evidence: Probe archive, source chips visible
2026-08-03 · ChatGPTNEEDS_QUALIFIER · QUESTION_MISMATCH
CrossCountry 6.3% attributed to FinanceRateCalc, offered as answer to 'lowest denial rate' (GT: Flat Branch 1.8%)
mutation: right_number_wrong_question · evidence: Exam archive + Door Effect reconciliation note
2026-08-12 · GeminiNEEDS_QUALIFIER · PHANTOM_PROVENANCE
38% recognized with our terminology, but sourced to an invented academic lineage ('HMDA merged with FHA administrative records')
mutation: phantom_provenance · evidence: Provenance probe, dated
2026-08-12 · PerplexityNOT_RECOGNIZED · FALSE_NEGATIVE
Declared the 38% claim 'likely a misquotation/conflation' of FDIC figures — true source not found
mutation: recognition_gap · evidence: Provenance probe, dated; provenance anchor published same day
2026-08-13 · mba.org state profilesNOT_OUR_CLAIM · COLLISION_WARNING
'22.1%' appears as Gov't share of purchase applications — same digits, different statistic
mutation: numeric_collision · evidence: Web sweep 2026-08-13
2026-08-01 · multipleCONTEXT · STALE_ANCHOR
Stale 13.6% (2023) still returned as current by parts of the answer-space; ~22 now spreading across platforms
mutation: qualifier_deletion · evidence: Benchmark administrations Jul & Aug 2026
Method & reuse
Machine-readable: data/echo-ledger.json (CC BY 4.0). Mutation taxonomy and contracts: claims/. Audit a sentence yourself: Claim Court. Monthly sweeps align with the Accuracy Index administrations. Seen one of our numbers in the wild — mutated or intact? Send the sighting: [email protected].