Methodology
How this register is built
The value of this dataset depends entirely on its integrity. This page states what counts as evidence, what does not, how sources are verified, how chronology is handled, and how the framework can be shown to be wrong.
What counts as evidence
An observation is recorded only where a market development can be connected to an observable change in economic structure: pricing, activity, interaction, capability scarcity, governance, value capture or revenue durability.
Recorded
- A company changes pricing because agents reduce seat dependence.
- A client demands lower fees because AI reduced the hours required.
- A sponsor builds shared AI deployment infrastructure across a portfolio.
- A regulator treats the control layer around a model as the unit of concern.
Not recorded
- A company launches an AI assistant.
- A firm adopts a model.
- An investor backs an AI startup.
- Any announcement of intent with no observable economic consequence.
The distinction is deliberate and strict. Adoption is not evidence about economic structure, and a register full of adoption stories would be worthless for the questions this project exists to answer.
Source hierarchy
| Tier | Kind | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Primary | Company filings, earnings calls, investor presentations, company announcements, regulatory and government publications, central banks, official pricing pages and product documentation, academic papers, original datasets. |
| 2 | High-quality independent reporting | Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and major specialist financial publications. |
| 3 | Institutional research | Recognised research institutions, professional-services research, ratings and analyst houses, and university research centres. |
| 4 | Industry publication | Trade press and specialist industry reporting. |
| 5 | Commentary | Blogs, social posts and commentary. Tier 5 should trigger research for a stronger underlying source rather than becoming the public evidence itself. |
Source verification
No record is published without a source that has been opened. Verification means resolving the canonical URL, retrieving the page, and confirming it supports the stated fact — not seeing the item in a set of search results. A search, redirect or tracking URL is never stored as the canonical source.
Links are re-checked on a schedule. Where a link breaks or the page materially changes, the record is flagged rather than quietly repointed at a different article, and the original URL and its verification history are retained.
An automated check can establish that a link resolves; it cannot establish that the page supports the claim. Those are recorded as two separate fields, and the second is only ever set by a person.
Observed fact and interpretation
Every record separates what the source supports from what Autonomy Economics makes of it. The two are stored in different fields and displayed differently. No source cited on this site has endorsed the framework, and none is presented as having done so.
Evidence strength
| Level | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | Anecdotal |
| 2 | Emerging |
| 3 | Moderate |
| 4 | Strong |
| 5 | Directly observable |
Level 5 means the predicted mechanism itself is occurring. It does not mean the theory is proven. Any record at level 4 or 5 must state the strongest alternative interpretation of its own evidence before it can be published.
Chronology
Each record carries two dates: when the market development happened, and when the reporting appeared. Autonomy Economics was posted on 30 April 2026. That posting date is the pivot rather than the date the paper was written, because what makes an observation a test of a prediction is that the prediction was publicly on the record when the observation was made. Evidence predating publication is recorded as prior art and is never described as post-publication validation. Of the 22 observations currently published, 22 were observed after publication.
Correlation and causation
Nothing on this site claims that autonomous capability caused an observed economic change. Each record states the mechanism it is consistent with, the strongest competing explanation, and the future observation that would separate the two. Where an observation has several plausible causes it is classified as ambiguous and stays there until something distinguishes them.
How status is assessed
Proposition status is derived from the published register rather than set by hand. Supportive observations contribute in proportion to their strength — a moderate observation counts once, a directly observable one counts three times — and contradictory observations subtract on the same scale. Observations recorded before publication of the framework count at half weight, because they cannot corroborate a prediction that was not yet on the record.
The derived scale stops at very strong. Asserting that a predicted mechanism is now directly observable is a judgement about the world rather than an arithmetic result, so it is only ever set editorially, is labelled as such on the status panel, and carries a stated reason.
Current editorial assessments
Two capital-coordinated deployment vehicles were announced and staffed within a week of each other (AE-2026-001, AE-2026-002). The predicted structure is not being inferred from second-order effects; it exists and is named. Whether it produces the predicted portfolio-level returns remains open, and that is tracked separately under Revenue Durability.
No proposition is scored numerically in public. The Evidence Index becomes a published number only after the weighting has been tested against a substantially larger register.
Assessment history
When an assessment changes, the previous one is preserved rather than overwritten. 9 assessments have been recorded to date. Someone reading this register in several years should be able to see whether its reading of the evidence evolved honestly, including where it weakened.
How predictions can be falsified
Every mechanism, law and proposition is published with the observation that would count against it. Those conditions are set in advance and are not revised to fit incoming evidence. They are listed in full on the challenges page.
The monitor runs a dedicated search for evidence against the framework, separately from its search for evidence consistent with it, and compares the two before any status moves.
How AI is used
Automated research assists with discovery, deduplication and a first-pass classification of candidates against the framework. It does not publish. Every record on this site was reviewed by a person, who checked the source, the separation of fact from interpretation, the chronology and the classification before it became public.
Citation
Source material is not reproduced. Each record states the fact in its own words, links to the original publisher, and retains the publisher, headline where available, publication date and the date the source was retrieved. Where a source is subscriber-only, the link goes to the publisher rather than to any copy of the article.