technical investigation · 2026-07
The 68% that did not exist
A fabricated figure in an early Context Brief motivated the numeric-anchoring gate. This is what it does.
An early brief stated that 68% of a sector's firms were informal. The figure was plausible, well-formatted and absent from every source in the run. It had been generated.
The fix was structural, not a prompt. Every numeric claim is now anchored deterministically to a source span before any model judge is allowed to assess the brief. Citations must resolve to a downloaded document body, not to a URL. A claim without an anchor is removed, and the removal is logged.
The gate costs time on every run. It costs less than one wrong number in front of a board.