MAHA PROVENANCE STANDARDMPS/0.1 · SPECIFICATION

The Maha Provenance Standard

v0.1 · DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENT · MAINTAINED BY MAHA STRATEGIES LLC · SPEC TEXT CC BY 4.0 · DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.21241308

MPS is a claim-level tagging system for nonfiction produced with or without AI assistance. It makes the epistemic status of every substantive claim in a document explicit, auditable, and machine-readable.

It exists because AI-assisted writing fails in a characteristic way: fluent, confident, well-formatted fabrication. Document-level disclosure — “AI was used in this work” — tells the reader nothing about which sentences to trust. MPS operates at the claim level.

New to the standard? Read the concise MPS explainer for its scope, limits, citation format, and canonical sources.

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1 · SCOPE

MPS applies to substantive claims: statements of fact, attribution, quantity, causation, or expert consensus that a reader might reasonably rely on. It does not apply to opinion clearly framed as opinion, rhetorical questions, or structural prose.

2 · THE FIVE TAGS

Every substantive claim receives exactly one tag.

[VERIFIED]

Confirmed by the author against a primary source, direct computation, or first-hand observation.

Test: Did a human check the primary source or reproduce the result?

[SOURCED]

Attributed to an identified, citable secondary source the author has read but not independently verified.

Test: Can the reader follow a citation to a real, identified document?

[BOUNDARY]

Accurately reports the limits of knowledge: open questions, untested conjectures, contested findings — where the claim's content is the uncertainty itself.

Test: Is the claim honest about what is not known?

[ILLUSTRATIVE]

Analogy, thought experiment, composite example, or structural metaphor. Carries explanatory weight only; asserts nothing about the world.

Test: Would the argument survive if this were literally false?

[UNVERIFIED]

Asserted without confirmation: recalled from memory, AI-generated and unchecked, or awaiting verification. A flag of honesty, not a license.

Test: Is this claim still owed work?

3 · TAG DISCIPLINE RULES
  1. No untagged substantive claims in a compliant document.
  2. UNVERIFIED is a workflow state, not a shipping state. Production documents should carry zero UNVERIFIED tags or justify each remaining one.
  3. Quotations and statistics are never ILLUSTRATIVE. A real-seeming number or quote must be VERIFIED or SOURCED, or removed.
  4. AI-suggested citations are UNVERIFIED until a human opens the source. Citation existence, authorship, and content must all be confirmed for promotion to SOURCED.
  5. Speculative frameworks (untested theory, forecast, conjecture) presented as context take BOUNDARY; mappings drawn from them take ILLUSTRATIVE.
  6. Tags describe status, not confidence. A tag is a record of what checking was done, not how sure the author feels.
4 · MACHINE-READABLE SERIALIZATION

Inline form (human-readable documents): a trailing tag per claim or claim cluster — Claim text. [TAG] — as practiced across the Maha Strategies book series.

Structured form (audit records): the JSON record below. The live auditor at /audit exports this format.

{
  "mps_version": "0.1",
  "document": "string (title or URI)",
  "audited": "ISO-8601 date",
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c001",
      "excerpt": "verbatim claim text",
      "tag": "VERIFIED | SOURCED | BOUNDARY | ILLUSTRATIVE | UNVERIFIED",
      "rationale": "why this tag",
      "source": "citation or null",
      "action": "none | verify | cite | reword | remove"
    }
  ],
  "summary": { "counts_by_tag": {}, "compliance": "pass | conditional | fail" }
}

Site-level declaration: a document or site may declare its provenance regime in llms.txt or structured-data metadata: provenance-standard: MPS/0.1.

4A · PUBLIC REGISTRY

The MPS Registry publishes versioned, machine-readable claim records for this standard. Each public record includes its evidence context, review metadata, and a content hash.

OPEN THE MPS REGISTRY ↗

5 · COMPLIANCE LEVELS

MPS-Declared — the document states it follows MPS and tags its claims.
MPS-Audited — an independent party has produced a structured audit record (§4).
MPS-Certified (reserved) — audited, with all UNVERIFIED resolved and a published audit trail.

6 · RELATIONSHIP TO AI DISCLOSURE

MPS is complementary to, and stricter than, document-level AI-use disclosure. A compliant document additionally discloses how AI was used (drafting, research, editing) in front matter. MPS does not prohibit AI assistance; it prohibits unlabeled uncertainty.

7 · PROVENANCE OF THIS STANDARD

Developed 2025–2026 across the Maha Strategies book series and research program, including an audit of AI fabrication failure modes and a pre-registered 15,000-query study of model reliability. The standard is published under its own discipline.

8 · AUDITS & ADOPTION

Maha Strategies conducts full manuscript audits against this standard — every claim resolved source-by-source, delivered as a structured MPS/0.1 record. To request an audit or discuss adopting MPS for your publication: mahastrategies.com/contact or mayone@mahastrategies.com.

Start with a free public preflight for a short passage, or use the private MPS Preflight for a longer document extract and a retained private report before commissioning a source-by-source human review.

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FEEDBACK & MANUSCRIPT AUDITS: VIA MAHASTRATEGIES.COM · VERSIONING: SEMANTIC