Provenance-Carrying Retrieval

A retrieval response that carries the means of its own falsification — binding served text to a content hash, an independent time anchor and a citable identifier, so that a machine reader can check what it is about to quote instead of trusting the channel it arrived over; and the generalisation of the same envelope to an append-only log, where the proof is the entire payload. A retrieval system that supplies text to a language model is, at present, an authority. It says here is the passage, and the model has no instrument with which to disagree. The failure this produces is not usually fabrication — it is quieter: a superseded version served as current, a truncation that inverts a qualified claim, a paraphrase that drifts, or a substitution somewhere between the corpus and the context window. Each of these produces a citation that is confidently wrong and locally unfalsifiable. We describe provenance-carrying retrieval: a response format in which every served document is accompanied by an envelope binding it to (a) a cryptographic digest of a named, fetchable source, (b) at least one independent time anchor, and (c) where one exists, a citable identifier; together with an explicit statement of what the digest covers and a runnable instruction for checking it. The composition has one structural consequence, and it is the paper's centre. It inverts the trust burden. Ordinarily a retrieval server asks to be believed and the reader may, at best, decline. A response that carries the means of its own falsification asks to be checked, and a reader who declines to check has made a choice rather than suffered a limitation. We then generalise. The same envelope applies to an append-only log, and there the generalisation is sharper than the original: for a log, the proof structure is the entire public payload. A ledger's transparency surface can be served in full — signed tree heads, inclusion proofs, consistency proofs, the published scoring function — while its contents are never served at all. This is not a diminished version of document retrieval. It is the complete version for that object, and it is what lets a transparency claim be verified continuously by machine rather than asserted periodically by an institution. We state honest limits at length. The mechanism does not establish truth, authorship, or good faith. It establishes only that the bytes you were handed are the bytes that were anchored, and that they were anchored before a certain moment. Every other virtue must be argued separately. Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/provenance-carrying-retrieval. Its SHA-256 is ab92758d5d1ceca0a621397a5acb47d10c95edcd612f4f9686aa60c78b702246, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.