Provenance tells you what a claim is allowed to do

User-provided information is what the organization typed: a cost, a headcount, a constraint, a deadline. It can be decisive and still be unchecked. Calling it verified because the team believes it is how forecasts become facts.

Independently verified evidence is a claim tied to a source someone can open, where the source actually says the thing the claim says. Inspector's job is that check. A citation that does not support the sentence is not verified evidence.

Unverified external claims include brochures, analyst notes, and confident web pages that have not been tied to the Decision's criteria. They may be worth reading. They are not yet support.

AI-generated inferences are conclusions the analysis drew. They can be useful and they remain analysis. They do not become evidence by being fluent.

Material unresolved uncertainty is a gap that could change the choice and has not been closed. Leaving it off the record is how a later surprise looks like a surprise.

Capital, a supplier, or a public technology plan often turns on one or two load-bearing claims. If those claims are user-provided estimates, the Human Decision can still proceed, but the file should say so. If they are unverified external claims, Challenger has something to attack. If they are inferences, Judge should not recite them as findings.

Supported, partial, unverified, and unsupported are statuses a reader can see. Agreement among models is still not evidence. That argument is the earlier essay.

Agreement is not evidence

Scout looks for material that could change the Decision. Inspector asks whether a source supports the claim in front of it. Champion may rely on a figure the team supplied. The reliance is allowed. Pretending the figure was independently checked is not.

When a source is challenged, the claim can be revised, conceded, or left standing. The history of that challenge belongs with the claim. A cleaned paragraph that keeps only the surviving sentence hides the provenance.

Provenance here means the Decision can show where a material statement came from and whether it was checked.

Do not use a status label as a substitute for the specialist who must qualify a supplier, validate a method, or authenticate a government record. The label tells the Decision what it is relying on.

Evidence and research