The DeAI Tracker's Verification Gap, Week of 2026-09-13

The Sunday chart this week is a flat line, and we are publishing it as one. The Decentralized Inference Provider Tracker's current export — generated 2026-09-09 — still lists 17 providers, 0 verified claims. The Price Index still holds a single dated snapshot, 2026-09-07. No new tracker delta exists this week; rather than fabricate movement, this report publishes the verification ledger itself: what the grades mean, where the 17 providers stand, and what has to happen before a number moves.

Key facts

• 17 providers tracked, 0 verified. The tracker export of 2026-09-09 records every provider record at record_status: unverified. This is unchanged since the tracker was seeded on 2026-08-24.
• 62 claimed field values, 2 corroborated, 130 unverified. Across all graded fields, 78 carry a non-null value and 143 are still null — the tracker records what is known, not what is plausible.
• The 2 corroborated values both belong to Chutes: its OpenAI-compatible API and its endpoint URL (https://llm.chutes.ai/v1), supported by public documentation but not yet confirmed by our own probe.
• 7 of 17 providers claim TEE-based confidential inference — Chutes, Morpheus, NEAR AI, Oasis, Phala, SolRouter, and Targon. None has an attestation our harness has validated; all sit at claimed.
• 1 volume claim exists: Chutes says it serves tens of billions of tokens per day (7-day average, self-reported, not cross-checked). All other scale fields are empty.
• The Price Index is one snapshot deep: 2026-09-07, 16 models from OpenRouter's public catalog plus the official DeepSeek V4 Flash anchor. There is no second issue yet.

What the grades actually mean

The tracker uses a five-state grading rule, and the rule is the whole product. A claimed value is a provider's own statement — a line in its docs, a roster entry, a marketing page — recorded with its source and date. Claimed is not a synonym for false; it is a synonym for unproven. A provider's claim never promotes itself, no matter how often it is repeated.

Corroborated is one step up: independent documentation points the same way, but our own reproducible check has not run. Chutes' OpenAI compatibility is the tracker's clearest example — the provider documents it publicly and it appears as an OpenRouter provider, which is consistent, but we have not yet probed the endpoint ourselves, so the grade stays corroborated rather than verified.

Verified is reserved for what an independent, reproducible check can confirm: a cryptographic attestation we validated, an API response we observed, on-chain data we queried. Privacy absence-claims — "we retain nothing," "operators cannot see your prompts" — can never reach verified from a policy statement alone. They stay claimed until there is attestation evidence to check, which is why all seven TEE claims in the tracker remain claimed today.

The two remaining states are unverified (nobody has checked this field) and n/a (the field does not apply to this provider). An empty cell is a fact about our knowledge, not a failure of the provider.

The ledger, week of 2026-09-13

Read this table as a ledger of what is claimed, not a ranking of what is true. Sixteen of seventeen providers are recorded as live; Darkbloom is in public alpha. Every privacy mechanism in the right-hand columns is the provider's own description of itself.

What has to happen before a number moves

The tracker's history is append-only, and only one thing appends to it: a dated, reproducible check. The check harness is the pipeline that promotes a claim — probing an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, fetching a provider's model catalog, validating a TEE attestation, querying a subnet's emissions on-chain, sampling a price. A claim that survives the check is promoted with the date and method recorded; one that fails is annotated, never silently rewritten.

That harness has not completed a cycle against this roster. Until it does, the correct tracker state is exactly what the export shows: a field of claimed and unverified values, two corroborated endpoints, and zero verified records. The same discipline applies to the Refusal Index — Cycle 1 is not scored, so there is no scoreboard — and to the Price Index, which will grow by dated weekly snapshots rather than silent edits. A quiet week published as a quiet week is what keeps the loud weeks believable.

FAQ

How many decentralized inference providers has DeAI verified?

Zero of the 17 tracked providers hold a verified claim as of the 2026-09-09 export. The tracker holds 62 claimed field values, 2 corroborated values (Chutes' OpenAI compatibility and endpoint URL, from document review), and 130 fields not yet checked. "Claimed" means the provider said it; nothing more.

What is the difference between claimed, corroborated, and verified?

Claimed is a provider's own statement, recorded as marketing until cross-checked. Corroborated means independent documentation supports it but our own reproducible check has not run. Verified requires an independent, reproducible probe — an attestation we validated, an API response we observed, on-chain data we queried. Only the check harness promotes a grade.

Did the DeAI price index change this week?

No. The price index remains the 2026-09-07 OpenRouter snapshot of 16 models plus the official DeepSeek V4 Flash anchor. The weekly sweep has not produced a second dated issue, so the September article stands as the current record and is not rewritten.

Which providers claim TEE-based private inference?

Seven of the 17 tracked providers claim a trusted-execution-environment mechanism: Chutes, Morpheus, NEAR AI, Oasis, Phala, SolRouter, and Targon. As of the 2026-09-09 export, none of those claims has an attestation our harness has independently validated — all are recorded as claimed, not verified.

Why publish a report when nothing changed?

An append-only tracker is only credible if quiet weeks are also on the record. A week with no delta is itself a data point: it means the check harness did not promote or demote any claim. Publishing the ledger keeps the audit trail continuous and prevents a silent gap that later looks like a missing week.