RETRACT reversal recorded, not erased

The refund went out.
The document was fake.
Now what?

Companies now hand refunds to AI agents, and 53% of the 445 organisations surveyed by the Cloud Security Alliance have had an agent exceed its intended permissions. Afterwards nothing connects the belief to what it already did. RETRACT is the shared memory that does: one agent commits a fact at a time, and when that fact turns out to be wrong it retracts everything built on it, cancels what has not run yet, and records a reversal for what has.

cluster embedder adjudicator
Write paths are closed without it. Stored only in this browser’s sessionStorage.

01 — Why similarity cannot decide

Every pair below is measured live, right now, by the embedding model. Marks are coloured by what they actually are. Look at the colours before you read the labels.

measuring seven claim pairs against the embedding model — the first page load warms it, about eight seconds

measuring…

02 — Eight agents, one fact, at the same moment

Eight agents each learn that customer 4471 verified their identity. They phrase it differently and they extract the subject differently — Customer 4471, cust 4471, 4471. There is one fact in the world. A correct memory ends holding one belief.

every belief, contradiction and effect row below is a real transaction against CockroachDB Cloud. No payment provider is called — the reversal is a ledger record, not a transfer

Naive shared memory

read → think → insert

0
beliefs held about one fact
0
claim keys
0
contradictions seen

RETRACT

read → think → lock claim key → adjudicate → write

0
beliefs held about one fact
0
claim keys
0
contradictions raised

03 — The contradiction that is real

Now a belief chain, and a claim that is not a rephrasing. Same customer, same predicate, opposite fact — at a distance indistinguishable from a paraphrase.

builds a real belief chain, injects a real negation, retracts for real

04 — The money already moved

Concurrency control stops a bad fact being written. This is what reaches the bad fact that was written correctly, believed reasonably, and already paid out.

05 — The receipt, read back through a path that cannot write

Every other panel on this page reads the database over SQL. This one does not: it is served by CockroachDB’s Managed MCP Server, an endpoint with no write surface at all. So the agent that shows you what happened is structurally incapable of changing it. This heading used to say “what your fleet currently disagrees about” — it counted open contradictions, and once the story started resolving them it always read zero. A number that hits zero exactly when the product works is a badge, not a dependency.

run 03 to produce one