Legal & Compliance FAQ (Evidence, Risk & Accountability)

1. How does CueCrux provide legally defensible outputs?

CueCrux builds every answer on evidence with provenance, timestamps, and content hashes. CROWN receipts document the retrieval process, ranking logic, and deterministic model parameters. This creates an immutable audit trail. In regulated environments, enterprises can present receipts as proof of due diligence and correctness, showing regulators exactly how a conclusion was reached.

CueCrux treats personal data with strict separation rules. User identities remain within WebCrux databases, while artefacts in FactoryCrux/Engine contain no personal data. DSAR requests remove user metadata while preserving non-personal provenance ledgers. Provenance objects hold only content hashes, URLs, timestamps, and licence information, never personal identifiers. CueCrux remains fully GDPR-aligned due to this architectural separation.

3. How does CueCrux manage licensing and copyright constraints?

FactoryCrux enforces robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag, and licence metadata before ingestion. Artefacts are tagged with licence identifiers (e.g., CC-BY, OGL, proprietary) and jurisdiction. Retrieval avoids mixing incompatible licence types when producing answers. If a page cannot be legally processed, the system stores only metadata. CueCrux maintains a full chain of attribution, enabling compliant downstream usage.

4. What happens if a referenced source is retracted or updated?

CueCrux performs nightly retraction syncs (e.g., Crossref, Retraction Watch). Retracted sources remain visible but receive severe trust penalties and clear banners in the UI. Updated content automatically triggers hash mismatches, alerting users that evidence has changed. Answers referencing retracted evidence link to updated receipts, ensuring no stale or invalid evidence misleads users.

5. How does CueCrux support regulatory audits and risk assessments?

CueCrux is designed for provable compliance. WatchCrux executes automated audits, checks drift, validates receipts, and logs PASS/WARN/FAIL states. OpsCrux exposes SLOs, provenance freshness, cost envelopes, endpoint reliability, and drift panels. Organisations can export receipts and logs for regulators. The Private Stack also supports federated proof verification for confidential environments.

6. What mechanisms prevent evidence manipulation or collusion?

The ATAM (Auth, Trust & Anti-Manipulation) system detects:

collusive citation loops
coordinated manipulation attempts
prompt-injection threats
retracted or predatory venues
anomalous source clusters

Suspicious evidence is not censored but weighted down and labelled. Users see all claims alongside risk indicators, avoiding silent suppression while maintaining trust.

7. What happens if a user uploads information that is false, misleading, or harmful?

CueCrux does not assume that uploaded documents are correct; it treats all submissions as claims that must be verified through retrieval and evidence checks. When a user uploads content, FactoryCrux assigns it a provenance record but never treats it as truth by default. During answer construction, the Engine evaluates uploaded evidence alongside external sources, enforcing QUORUM (MiSES), domain diversity, contradiction detection, and recency scoring. If the uploaded content conflicts with trustworthy external evidence, the system highlights the contradiction, reduces weight, and may exclude it entirely in verified or audit mode. This prevents malicious or mistaken uploads from influencing answers, ensuring user-submitted data cannot silently distort factual outputs.

8. How does CueCrux handle uploads that could cause reputational harm or defamation?

CueCrux is designed to avoid reproducing unverified or defamatory statements. If a user uploads material containing allegations, personal claims, or reputationally sensitive statements, the system does not automatically surface them in answers. Instead, CueCrux:

Treats the upload as “one source among many”,
Checks for supporting independent evidence,
Searches for counterfactual or contradictory evidence,
Flags disputes with explicit banners, and
Refuses to summarise uncorroborated claims in verified/audit mode.

If a claim lacks independent verification or conflicts with primary sources, CueCrux will return “insufficient evidence” or mark the claim as disputed. This dramatically reduces defamation risk, because the system is not a blind amplifier it is a verification engine. Combined with provenance and receipts, CueCrux can always show the audit path taken, demonstrating good-faith handling of sensitive material.

9. How does CueCrux protect against reputational damage caused by mistaken or ignorant user uploads?

Many users upload incorrect or outdated information unintentionally. CueCrux uses recency weighting, contradiction detection, and provenance integrity checks to prevent these mistakes from shaping outputs. Even if a user submits an obsolete or misunderstood document, CueCrux compares its claims against high-authority external sources. If mismatches occur, the system highlights that the uploaded content does not align with current guidance. Rather than punishing users for mistakes, CueCrux educates by signalling the shortcomings of the evidence and offering guidance sourced from more reliable data. This safeguards both users and the platform from relying on outdated, incomplete or misunderstood material.

10. How does CueCrux handle malicious uploads or attempts to manipulate the corpus?

CueCrux integrates multiple defences from the ATAM (Auth, Trust & Anti-Manipulation) framework:

Similarity detection prevents mass-uploading of near-duplicate propaganda.
Reputation priors penalise content from known hostile venues.
Collusion detection reveals clusters of mutually reinforcing artefacts.
Prompt-injection firewalls block attempts to embed instructions into uploaded content.
Counterfactual search uncovers contradictory evidence to prevent one-sided narratives.

Because every piece of evidence must pass QUORUM (MiSES), provenance verification, licensing checks, and multi-domain validation, malicious artefacts cannot “outvote” the wider corpus. Hostile uploads therefore have negligible power unless they are genuinely supported by independent, high-quality external evidence, a condition rarely met by bad actors.

11. What legal protections does CueCrux have when users upload harmful or unlawful content?

CueCrux benefits from strong architectural and procedural defences:

It does not publish uploads directly; it processes them internally.
It does not endorse user submissions; it verifies or rejects them.
It shows receipts that prove how each answer was constructed.
It prevents unverified claims from appearing in authoritative summaries.
It retains logs and provenance for all uploads, enabling swift takedown.

In legal terms, CueCrux acts as a processor of user-submitted material, subjecting content to verification and filtering rather than hosting it publicly. This materially reduces liability exposure in areas such as defamation, misinformation, copyright infringement, or negligence.

12. How does CueCrux avoid being accused of bias or discriminatory outputs?

Bias concerns typically arise when AI models produce ungrounded or one-sided content. CueCrux mitigates this through:

Evidence-weighting instead of opinion-weighting, ensuring answers reflect the distribution of credible sources.
Counterfactual exposure, which surfaces alternative perspectives automatically.
Transparent weighting factors, including source authority, recency and domain diversity.
Explicit labelling of disputes, avoiding artificial certainty.
Receipts, enabling auditors to trace each signal used in the answer.

This makes CueCrux less vulnerable to accusations of systemic bias, because it does not rely on opaque model behaviour. Instead, it reveals the underlying evidence, allowing users and regulators to inspect weighting choices and verify fairness. If bias is present in source evidence, CueCrux surfaces the bias as a property of the source ecosystem, not the model.

13. How does CueCrux address regulatory concerns about misinformation or harmful outputs?

CueCrux’s trust architecture is designed to satisfy emerging AI regulatory frameworks (AI Act, DSA, FTC guidance). Key safeguards include:

Refusal behaviour for insufficient evidence.
Contradiction banners for contested claims.
Retracted-source detection, preventing reliance on outdated science.
Receipts that prove compliance with safety policies.
Independent audits via WatchCrux, ensuring ongoing platform integrity.

This gives regulators a concrete baseline: CueCrux does not claim truth it presents evidence with transparent provenance. Its design makes it easy for auditors to verify that the platform operated within safety constraints, reducing regulatory risk and helping organisations remain compliant during investigations.

14. Can harmful or defamatory outputs still occur, and how does CueCrux respond if they do?

No system is perfect, but CueCrux’s layered safety stack makes harmful outputs extremely unlikely. If they occur, the platform provides:

Immediate appeals pathways through SupportCrux.
Receipts showing exactly how the output was formed.
Clear transparency if an incorrect source was used.
Rapid correction via ingestion or retraction flags.
Cross-checks that ensure the error cannot propagate.

Because every answer has a provenance trail, CueCrux can demonstrate good-faith handling, reducing liability. The system’s architecture also allows teams to isolate the root cause: model drift, source manipulation, stale evidence, ingestion error, or user-uploaded misinformation. This makes remediation fast, targeted, and audit-safe.

15. What prevents CueCrux from being held liable for user-generated content?

CueCrux is architecturally aligned with legal “safe harbour” principles because:

It does not publish user uploads; it processes them internally.
It performs verification, filtering, and evidence analysis rather than endorsing the content.
Outputs reflect evidence weight, not opinion or narrative.
Harmful claims without strong evidence are withheld entirely.
Receipts provide full accountability for how the system handled user data.

CueCrux behaves like a “verification engine”, not a publishing platform; a distinction that significantly reduces liability risk and strengthens regulatory defensibility.

16. How does CueCrux handle internal investigations or legal escalations?

CueCrux maintains:

append-only provenance ledgers,
CROWN receipts,
WatchCrux audit reports,
OpsCrux system events,
task and ingestion logs,

which together provide a complete, tamper-evident record of how evidence was processed. During a dispute or inquiry, CueCrux can reproduce every step involved in producing any answer, including counterfactual branches. This reproducibility provides powerful legal protection by demonstrating procedural integrity, good-faith operation, and a verifiable chain of custody for all sources.

17. Why is CueCrux well protected against lawsuits alleging bias, misinformation or harm?

Because CueCrux does not claim correctness; it claims provenance.
It does not say “this is true”, but rather:
“This is what the evidence says, from these sources, with these contradictions, under these conditions, verified at this time.”

This distinction, backed by receipts and verification rules, creates strong legal grounding. It shows that the platform:

did not fabricate claims,
did not ignore contradictory evidence,
did not misrepresent source material,
did not elevate low-quality sources without reason.

CueCrux becomes extremely defensible because its behaviour is transparent, documented, and verifiable.