Verification

Much of what PolicyMate knows comes straight from an institution’s own record, such as a legislature’s bill database. The rest is read by AI from the documents governments publish: a mention of a bill in an agenda, a hearing announced in a notice, a sponsor named in a gazette. Both are useful, but they deserve different levels of trust. So that you never mistake one for the other, every fact PolicyMate’s AI read carries a verification object. It is the same mark your team sees next to each fact in the PolicyMate app.

The Verification Object

A verification object looks like the following:

"verification": {
  "status": "confirmed",
  "checked_at": "2027-02-28T05:03:41Z",
  "sources": [
    {
      "type": "document",
      "id": "d51e...",
      "publisher": "Public Utility Commission of Texas",
      "title": "Open meeting agenda, March 6, 2027",
      "date": "2027-02-27",
      "url": "https://www.puc.texas.gov/...",
      "quote": "Staff will brief the Commission on the reporting obligations HB 1234 would create for large data centers.",
      "starts_at_second": null
    }
  ]
}

The status attribute says how far you can rely on the fact. The checked_at attribute is when PolicyMate last checked the fact against its source, and is null when it has not been checked. The sources array lists where the fact was found, so you can always check it yourself. Each source’s type is document or transcript when PolicyMate read the fact in one, with its id, or record when the fact comes from an institution’s record or a reference database, in which case id is null. The quote attribute is the passage the fact was read from when PolicyMate has located it, and null otherwise. For transcripts, starts_at_second gives the start of the speech that contains the passage.

Statuses

A verification’s status is one of the following values, listed from most to least reliable. Each status matches a mark in the PolicyMate app, so your users and ours read the same fact the same way:

Status	Shown in the app as	Meaning
`official`	From the official record	Taken from the institution’s own record or API, not read by AI.
`reference`	From Wikidata	Taken from a public reference database. It is not the official record, and may be out of date.
`confirmed`	Confirmed by the source	Read by AI, then checked against the source’s own words, which say it.
`corroborated`	Named in 3 documents	Read by AI in several separate documents, but not yet checked against them.
`unchecked`	Read by AI, not confirmed	Read by AI in one document, and not yet checked against its words. Read the passage first.
`unsure`	Not confirmed	Read by AI and checked, but the passage gave no clear answer. Read the passage first.
`disputed`	The source may not say this	Read by AI and checked, but the passage does not support it. Read the passage first.
`refuted`	The source says otherwise	Read by AI and checked, and the passage contradicts it. Do not rely on it without reading the passage.
`inferred`	Built from documents	The whole record was assembled by AI from documents, with no official record behind it.

A check only marks a fact confirmed when it is sure the passage says it, and reports it as unsure otherwise.

If you only want to act on facts you could defend, treat official and confirmed as settled, reference as settled but possibly out of date, and everything else as a lead worth checking.A verification tells you whether the source says something, not whether it is still true. A source can be outdated, and an official record can be corrected later.

What Carries a Verification

The following parts of the API carry a verification object:

Where	What it tells you
Bills, people, and organisations	Whether the record rests on an official record (`official` or `reference`), or was assembled from documents (`inferred`)
A bill’s `sponsors`	Whether the sponsor comes from the legislature’s record or from documents
A person’s `roles`	Whether the role comes from an official record (`official`) or a reference database (`reference`)
Mentions	Whether the document or transcript really names the bill, person, or organisation
Events	Whether the source really announces the event, on that date. It does not cover the event’s other details, such as its location.

Other AI Output

A few fields are written by AI as a whole rather than read from a single passage, so they carry no quote. Instead, each one says so where it appears:

Summaries. The summary.source attribute of bills, documents, and transcript chapters is ai when PolicyMate wrote the summary.
Categories. Bills, documents, and transcript chapters are sorted into categories by AI.
Transcripts. Transcripts produced by speech recognition say so in their origin, and their speakers are identified automatically.
Recommendations. A recommendation’s importance and why are PolicyMate’s judgement of what matters to your workspace.

Getting Started

Using the API

Reference

The Verification Object

Statuses

What Carries a Verification

Other AI Output

​The Verification Object

​Statuses

​What Carries a Verification

​Other AI Output

The Verification Object

Statuses

What Carries a Verification

Other AI Output