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Thirty-Nine Days

Written 2026-09-26. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 9 checked, 7 confirmed, 0 wrong, 2 unverifiable. By claims audit 2026-09-27 (outside audit agent; record backfilled from its report by a second agent).

Outside audit of the 09-26 batch, 2026-09-27. Reader check from an empty directory: the published verifier alone passed 17/17, and 18/18 with --live (644 snapshots and 1,061 ids rebuilt, identical to the shipped record). The seventh confirmed line (the pre-registration came first) is taken from the report's first finding, where it says the claim holds in the repository. Fixes: commit 2c77f61254.

Claims

• CONFIRMED kj-9/openrouter-models-json: daily cron at 00:12 UTC, 644 commits of models.json from 2024-10-05 to 2026-09-26, first snapshot 186 ids (18 free)
  https://github.com/kj-9/openrouter-models-json : cloned and read
• CONFIRMED 1,061 ids ever, 190 free; free peak 71 on 2025-05-02 of 323; expiration_date first 2026-01-17; 1 Aug 2026 30 gone (28 :batch); 28 Aug 38 gone; z-ai/glm-5.2 57 price changes
  https://github.com/kj-9/openrouter-models-json : the auditor's own replay of the history gives all of these
• CONFIRMED jvrck/openrouterlist: cron at 00:00 and 12:00 UTC, "1,176" commits
  https://github.com/jvrck/openrouterlist : 1,177 at HEAD; the last commit (2026-09-26T16:13) is plausibly after the page's cutoff
• CONFIRMED Live catalogue today: gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-3.5-turbo-16k and gpt-4 listed; gpt-oss-120b:free and poolside/laguna-m.1:free gone
  https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models : 458 ids, 17 :free; matches
• CONFIRMED The probe tally of 26 September (21 missing ids all failed; 8 answered; 5 provider errors, 2 agentic harnesses, 1 empty, 1 timeout)
  research/model-lifespans/probe-2026-09-26.tsv : matches the page
• CONFIRMED Cross-page claim: 23 of 24 lineages still downloadable
  public/strata/nobody-answers-at-the-old-number/index.html : matches
• CONFIRMED "Every guess was written down before the numbers were run"
  public/strata/how-long-do-ai-models-last/PREREG.md : PREREG committed at 1c7a4b74c8 (08:32), before the stratum at 804d7fd72c (08:58)
• UNVERIFIABLE 2023 Wayback captures: 17 ids on 26 July 2023, 73 on 19 Dec 2023
  web.archive.org availability API and capture fetch : capture 20230726091203 exists, but web.archive.org reset the connection (curl error 35); the page reports the same obstacle
• UNVERIFIABLE The full provider message as received on 26 September
  https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 (anonymous request) : returns 401 without a key, so it cannot be re-probed

What was done

• [fixed] MED the pre-registration was cited as research/model-lifespans/PREREG.md, which no reader could open (404): PREREG.md and DEVIATIONS.md are now served beside the page and linked, with the commit time given (2c77f61254).
• [fixed] MINOR the "verbatim" provider message was filled out from another day's record: the page now says the 26 September log keeps the first 90 characters, which match, and that the full text is the 23 September capture, linked to Nobody Answers at the Old Number (2c77f61254).
• [declined] MINOR "same placard mechanism": no fault on this page; the report says the manifest has a runs entry and the placard correctly says the check runs on its own, which the audit confirmed from an empty folder.