Method & sources
Official sources, without false equivalence.
The corpus contains five selected U.S. issue-spotting records; it is not comprehensive. Agency press releases, complaint announcements, agency guidance, voluntary standards, and legislative status records are labeled by type. They are not all “primary legal authorities.” Each record separates the supported proposition, applicability boundary, and RN-authored workflow suggestion.
Sources were manually checked ; next review is due .
How a record enters the register
Three tests, applied in order. The document must be published by the body that issued it, at an official URL on that body’s own domain. It must reduce to a single proposition the document actually states, rather than one a reader could infer from it. And it must carry a boundary naming what it does not establish.
A source that fails the third test is left out. For a founder, a citation that appears to prove more than it does is worse than no citation: it converts an open question into a false settlement, and it does so at the moment the question is being decided.
What each field carries
- Proposition
- What the document says, restated without extension. If the register’s sentence claims more than the source’s, the record is wrong.
- Boundary
- The edge of that statement — the reading it will not support. This field exists because the failure mode of a source list is over-reading, not under-reading.
- Source type
- The genre of the document: press release, complaint announcement, agency guidance, voluntary framework, or bill record. Genre sets weight.
- Authority level
- What kind of official act it is. “Official” describes the publisher, never the bindingness.
- Jurisdiction
- The legal system the record belongs to, including when that system is voluntary rather than territorial.
- Checked on · next review
- The date the URL was last fetched and read, and the date it is due again.
- RN workflow suggestion
- Written here, not by the agency. It is an operational habit, not a compliance requirement, and no cited source states it.
Why these sources are not ranked equally
All five records are official. They are not equivalent, and presenting them as a flat list would be the false equivalence this page is named against. In descending order of weight:
- Settled enforcement order — an outcome with legal effect on the named parties. Case-specific, and not a universal rule.
- Agency guidance — the agency’s stated reading of its own rules. Informative, not individualized advice.
- Voluntary framework — adopted by choice. NIST AI RMF 1.0 is under revision and is not a safe harbor.
- Complaint allegation — what an agency asserts before adjudication. An allegation is not a finding.
- Introduced legislation — a proposal referred to committee. Not law, and it creates no present duty.
The distinction is operational, not academic. A founder who treats an introduced bill as binding spends money early against a duty that does not exist; one who treats a settled order as unrelated commentary carries a risk already documented in public. That is why every card names its type and authority before its title.
The five records
Generated from the same file the register is built from, so this table and the workspace cannot disagree.
| Record | Document type | Authority | Jurisdiction | Source date | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Substantiate AI claims made to investors (underlying document) | SEC press release summarizing settled order | Official agency source | United States — federal securities law | 2024-10-10 | |
| Substantiate AI marketing claims before launch | FTC complaint announcement | Official agency allegation | United States — federal consumer protection | 2025-08-21 | |
| Create an AI risk-management operating loop | NIST voluntary framework | Official standards guidance | Voluntary U.S. framework | 2023-01-26 | |
| Track the CREATE AI Act without treating it as law | Congress.gov bill record | Official legislative status | United States — proposed federal legislation | 2025-03-26 | |
| Identify a securities exemption before fundraising | SEC small-business guidance | Official agency guidance | United States — federal securities law | Current resource |
Verification
Each URL in the table was fetched and read on , and the proposition was checked against the document rather than against a summary of it. Where a press release describes an underlying order, the order itself is linked as well, because the release is the agency’s description and the order is the act.
Review is monthly. Between reviews this register is out of date by design rather than by accident, which is why every card carries its own check date instead of relying on a single site-wide freshness claim.
A record changes when the document behind it changes: a bill advances or dies, NIST publishes the revision it has announced, or an allegation reaches judgment and becomes a finding. When that happens the record is rewritten or withdrawn at the next review, and its date moves with it.
What this register does not cover
No state law. No EU AI Act or any non-U.S. regime. No sector regulators — health, financial services, education, employment. No case law, and no attorney commentary. Five records are an index of where to look first, not coverage of a field.
The gaps are larger than the contents, and deliberately so: a short list that states its limits is usable, and a long list that implies completeness is not. Use this to decide what to ask counsel about, not to decide whether you need counsel.
Review rules
- Complaint allegations are not final findings.
- Settlements are case-specific.
- Guidance is not individualized advice.
- NIST AI RMF is voluntary and under revision.
- Introduced legislation is not enacted law.
- Operational suggestions are RN-authored, not requirements stated by the cited source.