A two-gate substrate-fidelity defense for any system that grounds external assets in citable knowledge. Gate 6 (cite-check) catches claims with no cite. Gate 7 (claim-verify) catches claims cited to a path that does not actually contain the claimed value. Together they close the substrate-fidelity concern that pure citation existence misses.

Source synthesis: anti-fabrication ladder; evidence ladder (verified / self-reported / contextual / indirect / direct); Wikipedia AI Cleanup field guide; Hamel Husain + Shreya Shankar on per-claim factuality eval (Evals are systematic data analysis on your LLM application, start with error analysis, not tests, Build LLM-as-judge as binary true/false, one judge per pesky failure mode, and validate against human labels).

When to use

Any external-facing asset that quotes specific numbers, dates, named entities, or source-system IDs.
Any positioning, battle card, or canonical-statement file before promotion.
High-stakes briefs (executive Q&A, board, customer-facing comparison).

How the two gates compose

Gate 6, substrate-cite-check. "Is there a substrate citation near this claim?" Catches uncited claims.
Gate 7, claim-verify. "Does the cited substrate actually support the claim?" Catches plausible-but-wrong citations.

Together: "the claim is cited AND the cite is plausibly true."

Process

Parse the asset for (claim, nearest-substrate-path) pairs.
For each pair, open the substrate file at the cited path.
Check if the claim's specific value appears in the substrate.
If yes → verified. If no → flag as CITE-VALUE-MISMATCH.

What counts as "value appears in substrate"

Exact value match ($1,047 matches $1047 or 1,047).
Within 5% tolerance for percentages and quantity units (minor rounding).
Source-system ID verbatim (e.g., HubSpot dashboard 138849319 must appear).
Exact match required for dates and named entities.

What does NOT count

A claim cited to a substrate file that does not contain the specific value, even if plausible.
A claim whose value contradicts substrate (asset says 70%; substrate says 65.1%, outside the 5% tolerance, flagged).
A claim citing a path that does not exist (Gate 6 catches earlier).

Output

Per-mismatch report: line, claim, cited path, what substrate actually says. PASS / FAIL summary. Exit code 0 if all cited claims verify; 1 if mismatches detected; 2 on file/config error.

Exit policy

Zero tolerance default. Substrate-fidelity failures cannot be averaged away.

Composes with

Cite-check (run first to catch uncited claims).
Voice enforce + humanizer (orthogonal: voice and truth are independent gates).
Preflight composite gate (currently advisory because the proximity heuristic that maps claim → cite picks the nearest path, which may not be the semantic match; false-positive rate is non-trivial).

Worked example

A canonical positioning statement claims competitor X has "no voice agent" and cites a battle-card file. Claim-verify opens the cited card, searches for "no voice agent", not found. Searches "voice agent" within 30 chars of "no", finds "AI for post-call" instead. Flags CITE-VALUE-MISMATCH: substrate says competitor has post-call AI, not "no voice agent." The error would otherwise have shipped externally.

Common failure modes

"PASS at cite-check" interpreted as "VERIFIED-TRUE." Cited ≠ true.
Round-number claims with no source-system ID anywhere in substrate.
Substrate-evolution drift: cite was true 90 days ago, substrate has been refreshed, asset still claims the old value.
Operator pressure to "just approve it", the gate's whole purpose is to be uncomfortable when the claim is unsupported.
Treating Gate 7 as a fact-checker. It is a narrow substrate-fidelity check, does the claim match the cite, not a full fact pipeline.

Calibration signal

Track under taste-type "substrate-fidelity-truth." Brier signal: post-publish corrections needed where substrate did not support the claim.

Claim-verify gate playbook