{
  "id": 20161080,
  "title": "Bothy: Building Verifiable AI Decisions With Arweave Receipts",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/15/bothy-building-verifiable-ai-decisions-with-arweave-receipts",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-11-15T10:23:16.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "HackerNoon",
    "slug": "hackernoon",
    "url": "https://hackernoon.com/bothy-building-verifiable-ai-decisions-with-arweave-receipts?source=rss"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Every winter in the UK, mountain road closures require a decision from a dedicated winter duty officer. Gathering data from the Met Office, weather, route topology, and incident history proves challenging as these scattered across various systems. To address this issue, the open-source Bothy platform was created. Bothy creates an evidence-first agent that watches a curated evidence graph, producing a risk assessment, a score, and a draft for the duty officer. The platform then hands the decision to a named human, who can approve or reject the suggested decision. The agent also produces defense briefs for supply-chain analysts, creating citations of potential outcomes if a dependency went offline.\n\nThe main issue with AI safety features is that they cannot independently verify if the output existed at a specific time, and whether the human signed it. In order to solve this problem, Bothy anchors SHA-256 receipts to Arweave mainnet at two critical moments: when the agent generates an output and when a human decides on it. By doing this, the platform creates a tamper-evident record, keeping only the fingerprint on the blockchain permanently. This ensures that the evidence behind a decision is verifiable at any given time.\n\nBothy accomplishes this by using a canonical payload, which covers the immutable fields only, keys sorted recursively, scores rounded to four decimals, and other relevant information. This approach allows a judge to recomputing the fingerprint in their environment and compare it to the server's anchored record, making the record tamper-evident by construction. The platform guarantees that the decision is a named responsibility-holder's signature on a specific outcome, with an audit trail that hashes to a specific value. If anyone edits the brief, draft, or log, the recomputation will fail, making the system reliable and trustworthy.",
  "summary": "Bothy anchors hash-only fingerprints of AI outputs — and the human approvals on them — to Arweave, so anyone can verify decisions without trusting the vendor.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}