Machines take content at scale. The disputes run on screenshots.
AI crawlers read the open web millions of times an hour, and models answer with what was taken. When it ends in front of a judge or a regulator, both sides arrive with server logs nobody signed and captures anyone could have staged.
LENTRA is the instrument that fixes the record at the moment it happens: signed at capture, chained, and verifiable by anyone, without us.
field groups per record
signature over all of them
calls to us to verify one
A visit by a fictional crawler, recorded at a fictional publisher's edge. Edit any value: the signature is re-checked in your browser on every keystroke.
Not detection. Not telemetry. Evidence.
A dashboard is not an exhibit
Bot vendors see the traffic, and keep it as private telemetry. Their word about your traffic is still somebody's word.
A log is not an exhibit
Your own server log is a text file you could have edited. By itself it authenticates nothing.
A screenshot is not an exhibit
A capture made after the fact, by an interested party, invites exactly one question: how was it staged?
Every crawl is a future dispute. Almost none of them leave a record.
Content is taken in a second and litigated years later. What exists in between decides who wins. Run it both ways.
Illustrative sequence, not measured data.
Solved. CDNs block AI crawlers by default across millions of sites.
Being built. Pay-per-crawl rails and licensing standards are live.
Still open. Nothing ships a record either side of a dispute can hand to the other.
Evidence cannot be reconstructed after the fact. It is captured at the moment it happens, or it does not exist. Everything else, however detailed, is a claim.
Two capture directions. One record.
Ingress: what was taken
A passive node beside your edge records every AI crawler visit as it happens: the agent it claimed, the network it actually came from, what it fetched, and the robots.txt and license state at that exact moment, pinned by digest. Signed, chained, portable.
Session: what was said
Structured, signed records of model sessions at the API level: the full prompt chain, model and version, parameters, output. The answer to “you engineered the examples”: the attack that has already retired screenshot exhibits.
Both directions produce the same object: a passport. The format does not care which way the machine was facing.
Source. Time. Method. Context. Quality. Rights.
Six groups of fields, one signature. The record carries not only what happened, but the standing to prove it.
Who came asking?
The requester as it presented itself and as the network saw it: the claimed agent string, the peer address, its network, and whether reverse DNS confirms the claim. A user agent is a header the client writes for itself; the record keeps both the claim and the evidence.
When did it happen?
The instant of the visit, established by a time source that is not our own wall clock, together with where in the path it was captured. Time is the field disputes turn on, so it is the field least entitled to be an estimate.
How was it captured?
A passive mirror beside the edge: the capture interferes with nothing and changes nothing about the request it records. A record that alters what it observes is not evidence of anything.
Against which terms?
What was requested, and the exact robots.txt and machine-readable license state at that moment, pinned by digest. Not “the policy said”, but the policy as served, that second, to that client.
What was actually served?
Status, content digest, size, and anomalies worth keeping, including a claimed agent whose network does not match its claim. The response is part of the fact, not an implementation detail.
What follows from it?
The rights envelope travelling with the record: legal basis, the pinned version of the terms, the uses that were reserved, jurisdiction. The part that turns a log line into a legal fact.
An instrument, not a witness.
Evidence is only as strong as the party who stands behind it, so the instrument is built to keep us out of that chain entirely.
You run the capture
The node runs on your side and signs with your key. The records are yours. We never see them, hold them, or vouch for them.
Verification needs nobody's permission
Open format, open verifier. Opposing counsel, a court, a regulator: the check runs locally and asks us for nothing.
Your expert certifies
The record is shaped for existing digital-evidence practice: digests, timestamps, and a certification by a qualified person. Yours, not ours.
Open verification is not generosity. It is distribution.
History can change. It cannot change quietly.
Every record carries the digest of the record before it. Rewriting one entry does not quietly correct the past. It detaches everything issued after it. Click any record below and watch the chain answer.
A quiet edit is the failure mode this is designed against. It is not a promise; it is arithmetic.
What a record proves, and what it does not.
It proves the moment
This request, from this network, claiming this agent, took this content while these terms were being served. Captured then, signed then, unchanged since, checkable by the other side.
It does not decide the case
A record proves what was observed, not intent and not liability. What it changes is the shape of the fight: the attack moves from “this could have been staged” to the reliability of a published, open system: ground that evidence practice already knows how to examine.
Two precisions that are part of the product, not footnotes. In the EU, legal presumption of time attaches to qualified timestamps, so the format carries a qualified-timestamp countersignature for records that need that weight. And a reservation in robots.txt is, legally, a sign rather than a barrier: a record of it being ignored feeds contract, terms and damages claims and regulatory processes, not circumvention claims. Anyone promising more than that is selling something else.
The same record serves both sides of the war.
Prove the taking
Signed visits with the terms pinned at the moment they were ignored: portable exhibits for counsel, and complaints to a regulator that arrive as verifiable records instead of assertions.
Prove the discipline
A signed crawl ledger of reservations honoured and requests refused: the artifact that answers an inquiry about your copyright policy with records instead of prose. A refusal that is signed is evidence of restraint.
An instrument only one side could use would be a weapon. Both sides make it a format.
Nobody wakes up wanting provenance infrastructure.
People wake up to one of these mornings instead. Most of them do not yet know they are our client.
Traffic falls while an AI answer quotes yesterday's exclusive. The logs show a bot storm, and nothing in them is signed.
A complaint that is true and not yet provable. Attribution dissolves into "upon information and belief".
A regulator asks how the crawlers honour reservations, and the only answer on hand is prose.
Everyone sees the traffic. Nobody signs it.
| Layer | What it establishes | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Bot detection | Sees the traffic and blocks it. | Its logs are private telemetry: unsigned, unportable, and not yours. |
| Legal web capture | Preserves pages a human investigator visits, with affidavits. | Points outward. Nobody captures the machine traffic arriving at your content. |
| C2PA | Signs content at the moment of creation. | Says nothing about who fetched it, when, and against which terms. |
| zkTLS | Proves a server's response without trusting the observer. | Built for web3 flows; has not entered evidence practice. |
| Observability | Explains your own system: traces, logs, latency. | Stops at your walls. The other party's crawler is not in your traces. |
| LENTRA | What arrived, what was taken, what was said, signed at capture, verifiable by anyone. | Your case. The judgement stays with you and your counsel. |
The blocking layer keeps its logs. The evidence layer hands them to you, signed.
The demand is not projected. It is docketed.
- Enforcement is live
- Since 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act's obligations on general-purpose AI are enforceable: training-data summaries and copyright policies are now examinable, with fines up to 3% of global turnover behind them.
- Attribution is the pleaded bottleneck
- Public complaints in the 2025-2026 AI data lawsuits describe rotating agents, residential proxies and “data laundering”. Cases are being built on canary content and subpoenas because direct attribution keeps failing.
- Staged exhibits are being retired
- Courts have discounted plaintiff-engineered model outputs, and plaintiffs have withdrawn their own output exhibits rather than defend how they were produced. What survives is the contemporaneous record.
- Violations are measurable
- Independent monitoring through the first half of 2026 reported a material share of identified AI fetchers reaching URLs their operators had been asked, machine-readably, not to touch.
Statements above summarise public filings, judgments and published reporting through August 2026.
Standards win the habits of the people who examine evidence.
SSL did not win because everyone loved SSL. It won because its absence became suspicious. A machine-traffic dispute argued without signed records should eventually feel the same way. The company is not the standard; the format is the standard, and the company builds the instruments around it.
Early, and specific about it.
LENTRA is a working project, not a finished platform. The format is drafted and the verifier is public today; the capture node is in build; issuer keys are demonstration keys until formal custody is in place.
- Now Open
- Passport format v0.1 drafted, and a public verifier that runs without us.
- Now In build
- Ingress profile drafted: the crawler-visit record. Capture node in build; its first live records will be the AI crawlers visiting this site.
- 2026 Evidence
- Qualified-timestamp countersignature in the format; a capture node running on real publisher traffic.
- 2027 Sessions
- Session profile in production: signed model-session records. Export to C2PA and W3C PROV.
- 2028 Practice
- The format inside evidence practice: certification templates, examiner playbooks, second-node corroboration.
Estimate. Dates state intent and sequence, not commitments already met.
Every machine fact, with a passport.
The war will be settled by whoever kept records. The end state is boring: like a notary, like SSL. Infrastructure wins when its absence is what looks strange.