What we wrote down was not quite what the sources said.

The founding release of the Restriction Index rested on the claim that the May 2026 Bloomberg dispatch on the expansion of travel curbs across Chinese AI researchers was the anchor event for the index. It was. But a primary-source audit found three smaller problems in the historical record sitting underneath that anchor: one row cited a Bloomberg URL that did not resolve (likely fabricated by an earlier automated ingestion pass), another attributed the originating dispatch on travel advisories at DeepSeek to Bloomberg when it was in fact The Information's March 14, 2025 piece, and the inductively-projected corpus contained a pre-travel-review event at Tencent that the founding Bloomberg dispatch had not actually named — it was projected by analogy from the firms the dispatch did name.

These are exactly the small errors a public-source-only editorial standard is supposed to catch. This revision caught them. The unresolvable Bloomberg URL was replaced with a South China Morning Post report (Zhuang & Mai, June 2024), corroborated by The Wire China and an MIT Sloan piece on the same Chinese Academy of Sciences pre-travel-review program. The DeepSeek travel-advisory row was re-anchored to The Information's March 2025 dispatch as the originator, with Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters carrying confirmations. The projected Tencent event was removed from the corpus.

On the cohort side: the founding release published scores on five pseudonymized profiles and held five real-named profiles back, on the principle that per-individual published scores require either a documented restriction event against that individual or external advisor sign-off. The audit added the five real-named profiles — Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek), Tang Jie (Zhipu / Tsinghua KEG), Yang Zhilin (Moonshot), Zhou Jingren (Alibaba DAMO / Tongyi), and Wang Yu (Tsinghua EE) — under a four-part public-figure standard, but only for internal feature-vector validation. They do not appear on the published scoreboard.

What this opens. The fabricated-URL pattern shows up exactly where you would expect it: in entries that originated from an automated ingestion pass without primary-source verification. The next release wires every pipeline run through a manifest with a data hash, so this kind of silent drift becomes detectable rather than invisible.