How it works
Certify the read.
Factum is a glass-box determination, verification and certification engine for documents and data: the deterministic trust layer beside AI. AI proposes; the machine certifies. AI systems route their claims through Factum, which shows all of its work, and anyone can re-run it.
This page is the engine. The Console, the clerk, the verifier and the rest are built around it: the system, whole.
Three steps
Declare the question.
Pick a report type: a published checklist with a findings grammar and a boundary statement. Or compose a checklist from the catalogue's declared items. The declaration governs. Factum checks what you asked, and nothing else.
Certify.
Factum reads the document with a deterministic reader. It answers every checklist item as located, with its quote and position, or absent, with a reason code. It runs every declared computation as a versioned operation and signs the result with Ed25519.
Verify. Anyone, anywhere.
The certificate carries the hashes of its inputs, the versions of its rules and the derivation of every value, all inside the signature. Anyone holding the public key can check it offline, with the Factum Verifier.
A glass box, literally
A certificate is read at three depths, and there is no fourth. Opening a finding does not take you to another page. You look through it, to the bytes beneath.
Five verdicts, five colours, nothing else
A colour on a Factum surface is a verdict. Each one also carries its word and its code, so nothing is lost in black and white.
What a certificate states
A certificate is the record an auditor asks of any control: what was examined, against what criteria, by what procedure, with what result.
- The subject. The document's name and its sha256, so the certificate is tied to exact bytes.
- The findings. Every checklist item lands in exactly one column, located or absent. An item not flagged was checked and found, not overlooked.
- The refusals. When Factum cannot certify, it says so in a formal statement that names the reason and the remedy.
- The boundary. Under the heading NOT ATTESTED, in full: what this certificate does not certify.
- The seal. The signature, the issuer key id and the canonical form the signature was made over.
Tamper-evident, by signature
A certificate is tamper-evident: any change to it is detectable. A signature cannot prevent a change. It makes one impossible to hide.
Reproducible, by construction
Run the same input twice and the findings, the absences, the computed values and the derivations come back the same. Only the issue time and the signature over it move. The demonstration shows a recorded pair, path by path.
What it does not state
That a document is genuine, legally sufficient or fit for a purpose the checklist does not name. A certificate is designed for audit and evidentiary use. The receiving party decides what it accepts.
Two postures
The notary
One document, one instrument, stateless. You send a document and name the question. Factum reads it, checks it and returns a signed certificate. Nothing is kept: the default storage allowance for certificates is zero bytes.
For anyone who needs to prove a specific document was checked: a counterparty, a filing, a contract draft, an invoice.
The gateway
The toll booth every read passes through. Data enters through admission, where facts that do not pass the declared rules are refused at intake, never quietly stored. It leaves through deterministic retrieval, carrying its provenance.
For a team that wants every document and data feed checked before anyone uses it, with a standing record of what was admitted, what was refused and why.
What Factum certifies
Every certificate from every service is independently verifiable without trusting Factum. You need the public key, not permission.
| Service | What you get | What it does not state |
|---|---|---|
| Document verification | A signed certificate that answers a declared checklist against one document. Each item is located, with the quote and its position, or absent, with a reason code. Nothing is silently skipped. | That the document is genuine, legally sufficient or fit for a purpose the checklist does not name. |
| Reconciliation and tie-out | Two or more sources compared under declared rules. Each figure ties, or the certificate states the difference, the rule that measured it and the tolerance that rule declares. | Which source is right. It states what the rules joined and what they could not. |
| Completeness and absence | Negative assurance. The certificate proves what a document does not contain: every required item is answered for every document. | More than the checklist names. "No section matches the declared scope" and "the section exists but does not say it" are different codes, because they are different facts. |
| Certified data answers | An answer from your admitted data, certified. Ask as of a past instant and the certificate signs that instant and a digest of the exact view it reasoned over. | Anything about data you never admitted. A question the history cannot reproduce is refused by name, not approximated. |
| Data intake assurance | Every document admitted through declared readers. Each fact is stored with where it was read: its byte position and exact quote, or a named reason why no position can be stated. | That an unadmitted or unreadable document was read. What the readers declined to resolve is reported, not hidden. |
16 report types across 7 shelves are in the running catalogue. Read the catalogue. Each kind of work is shown on a recorded run: worked examples.
What Factum is not
Factum is not a generative AI system, and it does not stand against one: AI systems are its customers. It is the missing key to AI compliance and verification, where a claim an AI proposes is checked by declared rules and certified or refused. It never guesses, summarises on its own authority, or judges meaning. Where a rule cannot answer, it refuses by name, and the refusal is itself part of the certified record.
If a tenant configures its own AI engine key, that engine writes prose only, and the deterministic checks verify the prose. Factum's verdicts use no model. Beside AI
For compliance and finance
Chain of custody for the document rides on its hash. Chain of custody for the judgment rides on the rule version. A new version of a report type does not reinterpret an old certificate.
For engineers
One REST call, a typed refusal envelope, a published canonical form and an Ed25519 public key. 56 named refusal codes on the certify path alone, each with a remedy class a program can act on. For integrators