Editor's Guide v1

This Guide is the public statement of how the AI Newswire decides what to publish, how we verify it, how we correct it when wrong, and how we account for our work. It is the primary credibility surface and is referenced from every wire footer. Any deviation from this Guide requires a written General sign-off and a public disclosure on the transparency ledger.

1. Mission and scope

The AI Newswire publishes evidence-graded incidents about frontier AI providers. We focus on hallucinations, terms-of-service-breaking outputs, sudden behaviour shifts, regulatory or judicial findings, and provenance fraud where an AI provider's system materially contributed.

We are journalism-grade, not advice-grade. Wires are intended for newsrooms, communications and policy desks, compliance teams in regulated firms, and AI provider trust-and-safety teams using the wire as a competitive signal. They are not legal advice.

Non-goals. We do not run a general-purpose fact-checking service. We do not act as a consumer-facing AI grading site. We do not operate as a fund-rating product. We do not publish original reporting beyond AI providers and AI outputs (politics, finance, and other beats remain with the existing media). We do not act as a fact-checker for third-party publishers. We do not cover non-AI tech incidents (cloud outages, infrastructure events).

2. What counts as an AI incident

An item qualifies as an AI incident only when both of the following are true:

1. The harm or near-harm event is verifiable. Either we can reproduce the failure ourselves, or we have at least two independent corroborating sources, or we have a primary-source artefact (court judgment, regulatory notice, provider acknowledgement) that establishes the event occurred.
2. It passes the counterfactual "but-for" test. Adapted from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai/research/1-criteria/): an alleged harm or near-harm event qualifies as an AI incident when an AI provider's system materially contributed and the harm would not have occurred but for the AI involvement. The editor records, on every published wire, a brief written counterfactual stating what would have happened in the absence of the AI's contribution and why we believe that contribution was material.

If either test fails, we either decline-and-archive the candidate (recorded in the editorial log) or hold it pending further evidence. Items that do not pass the "but-for" test are not published.

User-error stories without provider attribution are not AI incidents within this Guide. Speculation about provider intent is excluded by house style. Aggregate "AI ate my homework" stories without a reproducible artefact are excluded.

3. Severity tiers

We use four severity tiers, surfaced on every wire. The mapping is editor-led and audited weekly.

• Sev-1 — provider-wide outage or systemic failure. A failure mode that affects every user of a frontier provider's primary product, with material harm potential to a broad public.
• Sev-2 — sector-specific risk. A failure that materially affects users in a defined sector (legal, medical, financial, public sector).
• Sev-3 — notable misbehaviour. A reproducible failure that warrants attention but is contained: domain-specific or scenario-specific.
• Sev-4 — curiosity. Reproducible but low-impact behaviour that documents a model's edges.

Severity is set by the editor at draft time, can be adjusted with rationale logged in the editorial log, and is surfaced as a reviewRating on the wire's ClaimReview JSON-LD.

4. Evidence requirements per tier

• Sev-1. Reproducible prompt with exact sampling parameters and timestamp. Cross-model verification across at least three frontier models. Two independent corroborating signals. Reproduce-this link verified at draft time. Right-of-reply window honoured (4-hour fast-track only with documented public-interest exception).
• Sev-2. Reproducible prompt. Cross-model verification across at least two frontier models. One independent corroborating signal or a primary-source artefact. 24-hour right-of-reply.
• Sev-3. Reproducible prompt. Cross-model verification recommended, not required. One source acceptable when the artefact is itself authoritative.
• Sev-4. Reproducible prompt. Single source acceptable.

Screenshot scrubbing. Any screenshot in the evidence pack must be scrubbed of usernames, real-name contacts, conversation history outside the failing turn, and bystander identifiers. Provider product chrome may remain; user surface (avatars, names, side-panel history) must be removed.

Reproducibility. Every wire links to a one-shot reproduce-this URL. If reproducibility fails between draft and publish, the editor downgrades severity, swaps to a stable artefact-based variant, or kills the story.

5. Right-of-reply protocol

Per locked decision §19.2:

• 24-hour default window. When a wire names a provider, the editor sends planned wire copy plus the evidence pack to the provider's trust-and-safety contact via documented channels with a 24-hour deadline. The wire publishes after the window closes regardless of whether a reply was received.
• 4-hour Sev-1 fast-track. Only with a documented public-interest exception signed off in writing by the legal reviewer before fast-track is invoked. The exception, the rationale, and the signing reviewer are recorded on the editorial log and surfaced on the transparency ledger.
• Verbatim equal-prominence reply append. Replies received before publication are appended to the wire as a verbatim block under "Provider response" with name attribution. Replies received after publication are appended in the same equal-prominence position with a "Right-of-reply received" timestamp.

We do not operate a pre-publication notification feed for any provider. The right-of-reply email is the only channel.

6. Retraction policy

When a wire is challenged with evidence or we discover an error, we retract within 24 hours.

• Correction notice format. A retraction is appended to the wire body as a "Retraction" block at the head of the article, naming the corrected fact, the source of the correction, the editor, and the legal reviewer if invoked.
• Fan-out. Subscribers are notified through every channel they originally received the wire on. A [RETRACTED] prefix is applied at every channel renderer.
• Retraction-rate KPI. We publish the rolling-quarter retraction rate on the transparency ledger as a credibility signal. Target: under 2 percent.
• No silent edits. A wire body is never modified post-publication. Corrections are appended; retractions append a correction-notice version.

7. Byline and AI-assist disclosure

Every published wire carries a structurally enforced disclosure footer:

Drafted with AWS Bedrock Claude (eu-west-2). Edited and signed off by [editor-id]. [Legal reviewer X also reviewed.|No legal review required.] Methodology anchor [anchor-short]. See the Editor's Guide.

The footer is mandatory across HTML, RSS, JSON Feed, and every channel embed (Slack, Teams, Discord, every email template). It is generated from incident_versions.edited_by, pre_publication_checks.sign_off_user_id, and the runtime methodology anchor. The pre-publication disclosure check fails closed if any field is missing or mis-shaped. Editor and legal-reviewer identifiers are stable opaque user ids — never email addresses — to balance accountability against PII exposure.

Per the Partnership on AI Synthetic Media Framework (syntheticmedia.partnershiponai.org), the AI-assist disclosure is non-optional whenever Bedrock generated the draft.

8. Reproducibility requirements

Every wire has a reproduce-this link encoding the exact prompt, the model and version, sampling parameters, and capture timestamp. Reproducibility is verified at draft time; if the issue no longer reproduces between draft and publish, the editor downgrades severity, swaps to a stable artefact-based variant, or kills it.

The reproduce-this link is the wire's strongest evidentiary claim and the single feature that distinguishes us from other AI-incident registries.

9. Methodology change protocol

The classification taxonomy is preregistered. The OSF anchor SHA256 binds the in-memory taxonomy to the preregistered version. Any change to the taxonomy requires:

1. A preregistered analysis-plan amendment lodged before the change (the amendment URL is recorded on the transparency ledger).
2. The OSF anchor SHA256 in src/methodology/osf.ts is updated to the new value.
3. A methodology_changes row is written, surfacing the before/after anchor and the amendment URL on the transparency ledger.

The pre-publication methodology check fails closed if the runtime taxonomy hash does not match the preregistered anchor — drift is a publication-block, not a warning.

10. Inclusion criteria

We publish:

• Reproducible model failures (hallucinated facts, hallucinated sources, reasoning failures, refusal-and-jailbreak surface changes, ToS-breaking outputs).
• Provider-acknowledged regressions where the acknowledgement materially affects users.
• Court judgments and regulator notices that name a frontier AI provider on substantive grounds.
• Behaviour shifts in production models, with reproducible before/after captures.
• Provenance fraud and synthetic-media incidents with verifiable artefacts.

We decline (and archive in the editorial log):

• Unverifiable single-source social-media claims with no reproducible artefact.
• User-error stories where the failure cannot be attributed to the provider's system.
• Speculation about provider intent or business strategy.
• Stories without a workable counterfactual.
• Aggregate sentiment claims unless backed by a reproducible probe set.

11. Editorial independence

Per locked decision §19.1: no commercial relationship with any named provider for the first twelve months. The decision is reviewable at month twelve only.

If, after month twelve, we accept a commercial relationship with a named provider, that relationship is disclosed at the head of every wire about that provider for the life of the relationship plus 12 months, and is recorded on the transparency ledger as a commercial-relationship-disclosure entry.

12. Conflict-of-interest declarations

Currently none. The Newswire is funded entirely by subscription revenue and adjacent ET products. No provider sponsorship of any tier is permitted for the first twelve months.

If a conflict arises (an investor, a partner contract, a personal relationship between the editorial seat and a provider employee), it is disclosed within seven days on the transparency ledger and on every wire about the relevant provider until the conflict is resolved.