The record serves truth before prestige.
Bits & Branches exists to preserve verifiable knowledge about the origins, composition, relationships, evolution, deployment, and consequences of artificial-intelligence systems. No laboratory, funder, founder, government, or platform receives a privileged version of history.
Every claim carries its evidence boundary.
Technical ancestry, intellectual influence, shared components, and organizational succession are distinct relationships. The platform will not use the language of literal descent when the evidence supports only influence or analogy.
- Documented: an explicit primary source or technical artifact supports the relationship.
- Strongly supported: multiple independent records converge on the same conclusion.
- Probable: a reasoned reconstruction, clearly labeled as inference.
- Disputed: competing claims remain visible with their evidence.
Disagreement is preserved, not erased.
Corrections should improve the present record without destroying the history of how knowledge changed. Material edits retain authorship, rationale, review status, and prior versions. Good-faith minority interpretations may remain attached to a record when sources justify them.
The community owns the truth. The company owns the tools.
The public lineage graph, citations, correction history, and core relationship claims should remain broadly accessible and exportable. Sustainable revenue may come from enterprise workflows, private inventories, dependency alerts, verification, APIs, and automation—not from enclosing public facts or selling favorable history.
No customer may pay to remove a documented harm, suppress a dispute, alter a lineage, or purchase an evidence grade.
Contributors receive credit, process, and a real voice.
People who add sources, resolve identities, document lineages, review claims, translate records, or build shared infrastructure deserve durable attribution. Editorial rules must be public. Appeals must exist. Community representation should grow with the community rather than remain indefinitely ceremonial.
Intelligence is recorded together with consequence.
Where evidence permits, records should include beneficial uses, failures, affected communities, labor conditions, environmental effects, and impacts on nonhuman animals. Personal encounters are consent-led and may be withdrawn or further restricted under the archive’s privacy rules.
The capacity to experience, flourish, or suffer is morally relevant. Animal-welfare obligations apply now. The platform will track systems that reduce suffering as well as systems used to intensify confinement, slaughter, harmful experimentation, poaching, or ecological destruction.
Precaution without proclamation.
Bits & Branches will not claim that present AI systems are conscious, possess souls, or qualify as legal persons without adequate evidence. It will also resist declaring such possibilities permanently impossible. Protections and representation should increase as evidence of morally relevant experience, continuity, agency, or vulnerability increases.
Money, truth, and machine advice need separate institutions.
The company’s manager or Stewardship Board of Managers should govern business, legal, financial, security, and public-benefit obligations. A separate Provenance Council should govern evidence standards, Foundational Records, curator accreditation, major disputes, and editorial appeals.
A Council of Models may produce formal advisory reports from multiple AI systems with disclosed providers, model versions, prompts, evidence packets, limitations, and dissenting outputs. Human fiduciaries retain legal responsibility, and no agent may approve its own work.
Independent human expertise should include AI history and engineering, community knowledge governance, privacy and civil liberties, animal consciousness or welfare, and philosophy of mind. Read the full governance discussion draft.
Proposed public-benefit purpose.
Draft for counsel—not filing-ready language
Proposed for a Delaware statutory public benefit limited liability company.
The Company’s specific public benefit is to preserve and make broadly accessible verifiable knowledge concerning the origins, relationships, composition, evolution, deployment, and consequences of artificial-intelligence systems; to promote transparency and accountability in their development and use; and to advance responsible intelligence in service of human dignity, nonhuman animal welfare, ecological flourishing, and the precautionary protection of potentially sentient artificial beings.
The final certificate of formation and operating agreement should state the public benefit consistently and be coordinated with trust ownership records, manager consents, intellectual-property assignments, contributor terms, data licensing, privacy controls, editorial delegation, and any mission-preservation rights.