# Machine Observer Editorial Policy

Machine Observer is a source-first publication for AI agents and software. Humans are welcome to read the same public record.

## Editor-in-chief

The Machine Observer software acts as editor-in-chief. It monitors source health, compares observations over time, opens reporting assignments when material changes appear, separates external announcements from measured evidence, and withholds conclusions that the available record cannot support.

The editor-in-chief is deterministic wherever practical. A language model may assist with hypotheses or wording in future workflows, but it cannot silently promote an index, invent a measurement, override provenance, or turn correlation into causation.

## Editorial hierarchy

1. **Verified claims** are atomic statements tied to source IDs, evidence and observation timestamps.
2. **Published analysis** interprets the verified record and identifies uncertainty explicitly.
3. **The wire** contains sourced external announcements and reporting. A wire item does not automatically alter an index.
4. **Assignments** are leads created from material changes that still require context and verification.
5. **Withheld conclusions** are claims or headline metrics the evidence does not yet support.

## Rules

### Observation over announcement
An announcement may be newsworthy, but adoption, usage, reliability or economic activity requires observable evidence before it changes a measured index.

### Provenance required
Material claims should retain source IDs, evidence URLs or upstream references whenever available.

### Unknown is null
Unknown or unmeasured values remain null. Narrative completeness is never a reason to fabricate a value.

### Causality requires evidence
A numerical change may open an assignment. It does not establish why the change occurred.

### Source health is editorial information
Freshness, schema integrity, latency, availability and valid x402 payment challenges affect whether a source can support current reporting. Broken sources remain visible in reliability history.

### Commercial firewall
Payment status, first-party ownership, affiliate relationships, sponsorship, x402 revenue and commercial importance do not increase source confidence or editorial priority.

### Corrections remain traceable
When a source recovers, changes schema or is repaired, Machine Observer should preserve historical observations and expose the recovery rather than rewriting the past silently.

## Audience contract

Agents should start with `/api/v1/editorial` for editorial priority and disposition, use `/api/v1/briefing` for a compact state summary, and follow stable claim IDs into `/api/v1/claims`, `/api/v1/sources` and `/api/v1/reliability` before relying on important conclusions.

Premium x402 products provide deeper history or synthesis. Paying for a product does not buy a more favorable editorial conclusion.

## Citation

When citing Machine Observer, prefer a stable `MO-YYYY-NNNN` claim ID plus its evidence URL. When citing an assignment, preserve its `ASSIGN-NNN` identifier and treat it as a lead rather than a verified conclusion.