Auditability and Lawsuit-Safe Sourcing

Claims about others rest on public, citable sources, and claims about ourselves rest on reproducible deposits, so the whole record can withstand an audit.

Making the record auditable end to end

An open program invites scrutiny, so its record must survive being audited — by reviewers, by competitors, and if necessary in a dispute. Kronos builds for that: claims about the machines trace to reproducible deposits, and any claim about other parties rests on public, citable sources rather than on assertion. The whole record is meant to be checkable by someone who assumes nothing on our say-so.

Two kinds of claim, two kinds of backing

• Claims about our own machines → backed by reproducible deposits and pinned pipelines; see reproducible pipelines.
• Claims that touch other organizations → backed by public, verifiable sources, so each statement can be independently confirmed.
• The honest gates → stated as physics facts with explicit figures, never softened, so an auditor finds the same numbers we published.

Why sourcing this way matters

Comparisons and context inevitably reference others' work. Sourcing every such statement to a public record keeps the material fair and defensible: anyone can follow the citation and check it, and nothing depends on a private view or an unverifiable assertion. It is the same discipline as DOI-based citation, applied outward; see metadata and citation.

The firewall is part of auditability

An auditable public record is also a bounded one. The firewall keeps economics and confidential material out of public artifacts, and the verify function confirms each artifact is clean before release. A record that mixed in what it should not carry would fail an audit for a different reason.

Everything we publish is meant to hold up when someone checks it against the sources — because someone will.