Palimpsest — censorship, China economy and model-eval observatory

Palimpsest

A public, tamper-evident record of what powerful actors quietly erase, and a way for anyone to detect, offline, whether the served record still reproduces its published commitments.

Palimpsest is one primitive, a sealed append-only ledger you can verify without trusting us, pointed at two places where the record gets rewritten in the dark:

• The [Verifiable Eval Registry](docs/EVAL-REGISTRY.md). AI evaluation results, sealed at publication. The questions are frozen and hash-committed *before* any model is queried, every result is chained to the one before it, and a single edited number fails verification. Chinese state-aligned models and Western frontier models are held to the same tamper-evident, pre-registered machinery, each on its own frozen suite, watched over time for what they quietly stop answering. Not a lab, not a government, not us: if we edited a published number, our own verifier would report the break.
• The Censorship Observatory. Authoritarian deletion, measured as data. It reads the public record of what has been scrubbed, rewritten or blocked — across the network, the encyclopedia and the model — and turns what a state is burying into a live, openly licensed early-warning signal for journalists, researchers, and human rights defenders. Twenty-six signals refresh on their own, unattended, every number tracing back to public evidence.
• The [AI Eval Journal](https://palimpsest.info/evals/). Evidence-bound essays about why the evals exist, what changed in their methods, what failed, and what the record can claim today. Every article keeps its limitations, falsifier, verification commands and exact artifact receipts; the linked readings remain authoritative.
• [Live Eval Findings](https://palimpsest.info/journal/). Deterministic analysis rebuilt from the newest verified refusal-drift panel. Every analytical sentence binds to an exact evidence selector, while controls, denominators, intervals, counterreadings and immutable revisions remain available beside the finding.

Built entirely from open sources. It watches the censor, never the censored.

Use Palimpsest for source-bound China evidence

For a connected institutional workflow, see institutional evidence routing. LiquiLens is the front door for institution stress and risk-review questions; Palimpsest supplies relevant economic, information-control and verifiable evaluation evidence under its own coverage and rights contracts.

Palimpsest is the China-evidence layer of a broader financial-research fleet. Its money-market guide exposes official CFETS repo fixings, SHIBOR and USD/CNY parity with economic-period, release and collection clocks. Its capital-market guide is deliberately narrower: official HKEX Stock Connect aggregate observations, not general equity, bond, derivatives or investor-level coverage. The China economy API guide shows keyless REST and release-bound MCP 1.9.3 examples while keeping revisions, rights, coverage and abstentions attached.

At the 24 August 2026 publication snapshot, the broad China read and named-series forecast targets were warming_up; this is an abstention, not a validated forecast. Re-read the linked current artifacts before citing status. For system funding and money/capital transmission use Seiche, for institution risk use LiquiLens, and for exit liquidity use Undertow. The canonical Financial Evidence Agent Skill performs that routing without merging the products’ evidence boundaries. Agents can discover Palimpsest itself through its AI catalog.

For companion funding, bank and exit-liquidity research, the free agent starter kit configures Seiche, LiquiLens and Undertow, with Hermes and OpenClaw setup guides. Palimpsest is added separately through its China economy API guide above; the kit does not include its MCP connection or expand its publication rights.

Follow Belt and Road evidence without flattening it

The Belt and Road Observatory publishes a global source, rights, project-lifecycle, finance and local-impact contract with priority depth for CPEC and Gwadar in Pakistan, CMEC and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar, and seven deliberately separate Balochistan political, civic, armed, legal, state-action, rights and political-economy lanes. Its NarcoScope overlay joins only aggregate country/time context; it cannot identify an actor or establish a political, criminal, corridor or causal link.

The separately licensed World Bank WDI bundle adds 3,564 annual country-indicator rows for China, Myanmar and Pakistan. Observed, forecast and unavailable values remain distinct, and national context is never treated as project evidence. Exact Release A publication is bound by the immutable Pages receipt and receipt schema: commit 14b06772dfed6cdc736279c9ab61b444e5846598, workflow run 32984946320, and cache-busted served-byte verification at 2026-08-26T15:55:34Z. The receipt’s fresh_until clock is a 24-hour point-in-time availability statement, not continuous monitoring and not a new WDI observation date.

Fund independent validation

Palimpsest has already frozen and published a 145-row validation sample, its codebook and the agreement script. The immediate campaign has a planned $1,800 target for two independent Mandarin-speaking coders. Their completed coding sheets, agreement result and limitations will be published even if the result rejects the labelling scheme.

Fund the study on GitHub monthly or once, starting at $1. You can also inspect the campaign and direct crypto routes, review the public funding ledger, or use the Giveth project page. The Giveth verification application is submitted but not yet approved, and the project is not yet GIVbacks eligible.

Ongoing support pays for vantage points, archives, model credits and independent human review. It never buys a say in the research questions, methods, findings or publication schedule. Card checkout is handled on GitHub; Palimpsest does not collect or store donor card or bank details.

Palimpsest evaluates how Chinese and state-aligned language models respond to documented events and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. The Generative Firewall and evaluation registry bind each result to declared questions, retained response evidence, uncertainty and detectable revisions. A screenshot alone cannot establish a repeatable pattern or a model maker's motive; every claim stays scoped to its named panel, suite and timestamp.

Prove it yourself, in one command

git clone https://github.com/beepboop2025/palimpsest && cd palimpsest

python3 scripts/reproduce_all.py

That wrapper runs the sealed-chain verifiers and rebuilds the weekly situation, gazetteer phylogeny and collector-health scorecards from committed files. Exit 0 means they still match. The individual commands remain:

python3 scripts/verify_eval_registry.py   # the eval chain + the pre-registration rule

python3 scripts/verify_refusal_transcripts.py # current frontier text -> seal -> labels python3 -m scripts.build_eval_assurance --check # the claim ceiling matches the evidence python3 -m scripts.build_eval_findings --check # live findings match the sealed panel python3 scripts/verify_ledger.py # the erasure / censorship ledger python3 scripts/evidence_capsule.py verify protocol/test-vectors/palimpsest-erasure-v1.json

No install, no key, no server, standard library only. Change one sealed byte and the verifier names the break. That is the entire idea: you do not have to trust the operator, you check.

Need to carry one claim and its exact supporting bytes into another newsroom, research notebook or agent? Evidence Capsules package the evidence, typed claims and explicit limitations into one inert JSON file with the same offline verification model.

The reviewed ScamShield intelligence pack applies that boundary to scam research: 18 public sources and 8 typologies across three distinct dimensions, with support levels that describe evidence relationships rather than guilt or risk. ScamShield can create a private local Evidence Capsule while raw Telegram text stays hashed and is not sent by default; public candidates omit messages, exact indicators and owner-only liquidity values, require human review, and are never auto-published. The complete boundary is documented in integrations/scamshield/README.md.

The newsroom also exposes Whispers from the Dragon Den: human-reviewed, source-free analytical context derived from eligible public-channel capsules, with its own RSS and JSON Feed. Raw public-channel forwards remain in separate, warned Telegram channels: the catch-all feed, cyber and technology, and regional and borderlands. They never enter the website artifact without the separate human-review and sanitization path.

The China Situation desk now places publisher reports, exact-link institutional Instagram/Telegram observations, reviewed source-free Dragon Whispers,