Early preview

Citations

An early preview of how provenance could work with AI-generated documents. Verifiable links between claims and their sources — with drift detection, background verification of every distilled context, in-app authoring, and an MCP surface your agent can use.

From claim to source in one click

Select a claim in a note or distilled context, navigate to the saved article that backs it, and Sombra suggests passages that match. Click one to commit — the citation is anchored verbatim and stays linked over time.

notes · lisbon trip

Mainland Europe's westernmost capital city — Lisbon is one of Europe's best food cities at nearly every price point.

✦ Capture as claim
cntraveler.com

There's no denying that some of the best restaurants in Lisbon are the most talked-about in Europe right now.

Captured claim · notes
“Lisbon is one of Europe's best food cities”

Demo replays automatically. Tap any step to step through manually.

Drift is computable, not rot

Citations don't break silently. The server resolves each one against current source content at read time — and tells you exactly what shifted when the underlying text changes.

The article confirms that Lisbon's tram 28 climbs the city's seven hills on a route the city has run since 1914.

Coincident — the cited text still appears at the original location.

The article confirms that tram 28 winds across Lisbon's seven hills — running roughly the same route since 1914.

Claim — was vs. now
Lisbon's tram 28 climbs the city's seven hills
tram 28 winds across Lisbon's seven hills

Drifted — the source has been edited; the matcher relocates and surfaces what shifted.

Links run both ways

Every citation is bidirectional. From a claim, jump to the cited passage. From a source artifact, see every collection or note that cites it.

Click any highlight to see its counterpart.

Why we're trying this

AI-generated text needs provenance

When an agent writes a distilled context for a collection, every claim should be traceable to the underlying material. Citations make that audit cheap.

Verifiable by default

Citations only commit when the claim text anchors verbatim. No silent fuzzy matches on the human-authored path; the agent path uses the same matcher but with a configurable confidence threshold and explicit candidates.

Drift over time, not just snapshots

Documents change. Each citation tracks whether its source still says what it said when the citation was made — so you know when context has shifted.

Same substrate, three surfaces

The in-app authoring flow, the background verifier, and the MCP tools all share one data model. Citations authored by an agent, proposed by the scanner, or made by hand show up identically — same chrome, same drift detection, same lifecycle.

Verification, not just authorship

Every time you write a distilled context, Sombra scans it for substantive claims and surfaces what's anchored, partially matched, or unsourced — inline, above the distill. Accept anchored claims in bulk, review borderline matches one-by-one, fix the unsourced. No LLM in the loop: deterministic sentence segmentation plus the same matcher that drives the MCP commit path.

MCP surface

Eight citation tools, available to any MCP client connected to Sombra:

cite_text

Propose citations with range + confidence; inspect before commit.

commit_citations

Persist a batch of proposals in one transaction.

find_citations

Reverse lookup — what cites a given source artifact or URL?

check_citations

Drift report for active citations on a parent.

supersede_citation

Replace a citation; the old version stays in history.

set_citation_state

Active / invalidated / deferred lifecycle transitions.

repair_citations

Re-anchor drifted citations to their current location in the parent.

verify_collection_context

Mechanical claim scan on a distilled context — returns per-sentence verdicts (anchored / loose / uncited) and the matcher's confidence. Read-only; for an agent driving a verification workflow.

Full tool descriptions are on the MCP page; the user-facing flow is documented in Docs · Citations.

Early preview

Citations are live in Sombra today, and they're early preview.

We're using them in our own work and sharing them publicly so we can learn how provenance should feel. If something breaks or the chrome gets in your way, please tell us.