Claim Maintenance: a specification for the continuous, independent observation of public claims (version 0.1)

Claim maintenance is the continuous, independent observation of the public claims an organisation makes about itself or its products: capturing each claim verbatim with its source and date, hashing and timestamping it so the record cannot be quietly rewritten, re-reading it on a schedule, recording every observed change without alleging anything, and measuring the claim against public evidence where — and only where — public evidence can settle it. This document specifies that discipline: the state machine and its transition rules (CLAIM_CAPTURED, CLAIM_MEASURED, UNMEASURED, UNCHECKABLE) including what evidence may move a claim to measured and what must never move it; the claim artifact schema; canonicalisation and hashing rules sufficient for a third party to reproduce every digest; the RFC 9162 Merkle construction, with disclosure that the publisher's separate legacy root duplicates odd nodes and therefore admits the CVE-2012-2459 collision; the timestamping discipline that reserves the word anchored for an upgraded and verified attestation; Ed25519 signature binding and offline verification against a DID document; and the conflict-of-interest and non-allegation rules. Claim maintenance is not fact-checking, not certification, not auditing, not reputation scoring, and not adversarial journalism. It asserts no falsity about anyone. No mark, badge, score, rank or index may be derived from any state. The boundary between an observed change (the bytes at this URL differ from the previous read) and a finding (a measurement produced this value, over this window, by this method) is the discipline that makes it honest. Contents of this deposit. The specification document of record (Markdown, SHA-256 9615da80f2ad016a68664536025dabf5c06fc9861e87a75bdd4f359c3227a4d6); the JSON Schema for a conforming claim artifact; the specification's machine metadata; a dated snapshot of the publisher's own register of maintained subjects; and the reference implementation with its test suite, including the test that proves the verifier rejects a tampered artifact. A specification with no runnable implementation is a manifesto. Licence. The specification is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal: it may be adopted, forked, translated, embedded in another standard, or superseded by a competing version, without the publisher's permission and without attribution. The reference implementation files are licensed MIT. Versioning. A published version is never edited. Version 0.2 will supersede this one by existing and by naming it; this deposit keeps version 0.1's original bytes so anything that cites it keeps resolving to what was cited. Canonical web edition: https://councilof.ai/spec/claim-maintenance/v0.1/ . Working copy and reference implementation: https://github.com/CSOAI-ORG/councilof-ai . Cite as. Council of AI. Claim Maintenance, version 0.1. CSOAI Ltd, 2026-09-22.