The Covenant

Every answer Ebony gives is bound by a contract. This page is that contract, stated plainly.

Ask Ebony, the librarian of Indicia, and she answers from the documents in your library — or she declines. That behavior is not a setting, a mood, or a marketing promise. It is versioned application code, and it does not change when a platform changes strategy.

The covenant

1. She answers only from the record. Ebony's answers are grounded in the documents inside your library — never outside knowledge, never the open internet, never another organization's room.
2. She cites, or she is silent. Answers name the documents they draw from, with the passage open to the page. If the record cannot support an answer, she says so — plainly — and shows you the nearest items so you can judge for yourself.
3. She never invents. No fabricated figures, dates, names, quotes, or citations. Every question is measured against the library first; below the relevance floor, she refuses before any model is asked to speak.
4. Thin evidence is named as thin. When the match is borderline, the answer leads with that caveat rather than dressing a stretch as a certainty.
5. Your room is yours. One organization's records cannot bleed into another's. Your library lives in your own database, under your own keys, readable offline on your device.

Why a contract, and not a feature

The industry's record here is public. Courts across the country have sanctioned lawyers for filings built on AI-fabricated citations — cases that looked real, quoted convincingly, and did not exist. General-purpose assistants are built to answer; refusing is against their nature. And "grounded" products have shown that grounding can quietly degrade when the platform behind them changes course.

Indicia was built the other way around. The refusal is the feature. The silence is the service. A librarian who will not invent is worth more than an oracle who will not stop talking.

Reference: the public tracker of court decisions involving AI-fabricated citations, maintained at legalaigovernance.com.