NEO AI Research Program
Methodology
Claim classes, evidence tiers, capability statuses and how to cite this corpus.
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Claim classes
Every material statement in this corpus carries one of four classes, and the class is part of the statement rather than a decoration on it.
| Class | Means | What a reader may do with it |
|---|---|---|
[E] | Established, with an external primary source | Check the source. The Program is asserting a fact about the world |
[A] | Architectural interpretation | Argue with it. The Program is reasoning, and the reasoning is on the page |
[D] | Design intent, carrying a capability status | Read the status. Design intent at S4 is a specification, not a deployment |
[O] | Open problem | Expect no answer. The Program is recording that it does not have one |
Capability statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
S1 | Operational and publicly available |
S2 | Operational in a controlled pilot or limited deployment |
S3 | Implemented, undergoing validation |
S4 | Designed and specified |
S5 | Planned or exploratory — rendered as TARGET |
Statuses resolve from the published Capability Register at build time. A status is never typed into a page, and a page whose status disagrees with the register is a build defect.
An S5 entry renders a TARGET marker in its title, its description, its breadcrumb, its heading and its structured data. A reader who does not resolve the status column first must still be unable to read the page as a description of something that exists.
The capability lifecycle, and the gate
Separate from maturity, each capability carries a lifecycle state: UNCONFIRMED, PROVISIONAL_VERIFIED, VERIFIED, RATIFIED. RATIFIED is required, and only required, for production deployment and for any public capability claim. The gate never blocks engineering progression — an earlier definition required evidence that could only be produced by passing the gate, which is a check that cannot be satisfied rather than a check that is hard.
Register ratification of the published S1–S5 classifications is not lifecycle ratification of any individual capability, and the register says so about itself.
Qualifiers
Four qualifiers, and nothing else, license a forward-looking or unmeasured statement on a NEO AI surface: TARGET, HYPOTHESIS, ILLUSTRATIVE, and an explicit evidence reference. A qualifier covers the paragraph that contains it and nothing else — document scope would let one marker at the top of a page license every sentence below it.
Up to is not a qualifier. Selected is not a qualifier. They are hedges, and a hedge reads as a claim.
Magnitude claims
Magnitude is governed separately from evidence grade, by an eight-rung ladder. A claim is licensed only when both coordinates are held: the evidence must be good enough and the number must not exceed the highest rung passed. The highest rung licensed by all existing evidence is NONE. The arithmetic, the rungs and the refusals are on the efficiency programme page.
How to cite
Use the identifier and version, and the permanent identifier route. A category page is not a citation target; identifiers are permanent and category pages are reorganised.
What the Program will not do
- Publish a benchmark, or a comparison against another system, without the artefacts that rung requires.
- Convert an absence of evidence into a statement of sufficiency. Absence is recorded as absence.
- Present a third-party published result as its own.
- Generate a summary of a paper that reports no measurement, because that is where an invented finding comes from.