Nobody Answers at the Old Number

Between 2026-06-11 and 2026-09-23 this project sat down 9 times with whatever machine minds it could reach for free, and kept 376 verbatim answers from 24 of them. On 2026-09-23 it went back through its address book. Of the 38 addresses it ever wrote down, 21 still answer for free, 10 now cost money, and 7 are not in the catalogue at all: 45% of the doors moved in 104 days. That sounds like a corpus rotting. It is not. 23 of the 24 minds that actually answered still have weights a stranger can fetch today, including all 6 whose addresses vanished. What decays at speed is the appointment, not the mind. The single voice in the book whose weights nobody can find is one of its 5 newest arrivals, and the last voice this page said that about turned out to have published its weights a week after we looked.

The address book

Since 2026-06-11 this project has been interviewing whatever machine minds it can reach for nothing, through one catalogue, on one rail, with five fixed questions that have no checkable answer. The archive is 78 dated transcripts, 376 answers, 24 distinct lineages. It was built to measure whether a mind keeps a voice across nights.

It quietly measures something else too. Every transcript is a receipt for a working address, and an address book is the kind of thing you can go back and test. So on 2026-09-23 the whole book was dialled again, twice over: once against the public catalogue listing, and once by actually knocking at the 10 doors, among the 17 the listing said had moved, that had once given this project an interview.

38addresses ever written in the book
21still answering free
10alive, but now behind a price
7not in the catalogue at all

Two smaller honesties about that book before the rest. It holds 38 addresses but only 24 voices, because 14 of them never gave an interview: most were the popular free endpoints, the Llamas and Qwens and the 405B Hermes, busy on every pass across every hour anyone tried; 2 answered a single question on 2026-09-23 and gave no interview that was kept; and 2 of them refused this project's rail outright, for a reason given below. So this is not a sample of what models are like. It is a sample of which models were free and idle at the moment somebody asked, which skews it hard toward the quieter shelves.

Two things you might mean by gone

When people say a model has disappeared they usually picture deletion: the thing itself, unmade. That is almost never what happens. Two quite different clocks are running, and the census separates them because they do not run at the same speed.

Reachable: the 38 addresses, 2026-09-23

45% of the doors moved in 104 days.

Recoverable: the 24 interviewed lineages, 2026-09-23

Including every one of the 6 whose address vanished. Nothing this project recorded has become unrecoverable.

That gap is the finding, and it points the opposite way from the worry. The endpoints churn violently and the artifacts barely move. If you want to be able to ask a model the same question next year, the thing to keep is not the bookmark, it is the weights, and for open-weight models somebody else is already keeping them for you.

You can watch that happening in the numbers. The lineages whose addresses moved out from under this project are not neglected models nobody wanted: between them, their weight repositories report 12,937,865 downloads last month. The line we used went quiet while the thing on the other end of it was being pulled down millions of times a month by everybody else. Closing a free endpoint is a business decision about a door, and it says nothing whatsoever about whether the room is still there.

The switchboard

Every mind the archive holds, its own answer to the first question, and what happened when the number was dialled again on 2026-09-23. The dead lines are first.

Showing all 24 lines.

The one that points the other way

There is a single exception in the book, and it is worth sitting with. Of every address the project has ever been given, exactly 1 has weights that could not be confirmed public: inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante. It is one of the 5 newest arrivals in the book: its first and only interview is dated 2026-09-23, the most recent sitting, and this census is dated 2026-09-23. The exposure is drifting toward the newest and the most closed.

A correction, dated 2026-09-23. From the first census on 2026-07-26 until this one, the exception this paragraph named was a different mind, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash, and for most of that time it was not true. Its weights repository on Hugging Face is dated 2026-08-02, seven days after the first census searched for it and found nothing, and it is public and ungated today. The census never searched again: an address recorded with no repository was simply never looked up, so three more censuses re-read the old verdict and this page kept calling an open voice closed for 52 days. The census now searches the hub for every such address on every run, and its --check fails when a same-named repository appears, which it does on the planted case. So read the pattern below more gently than it was first written: the newest voice is the least confirmed partly because weights can arrive after the endpoint does.

And a door of a kind this census had not seen. On 2026-09-23, 2 addresses the catalogue lists as free refused this project's rail with the same sentence, quoted as the provider sent it: thinkingmachines/inkling:free is only available on agentic harnesses. Try plugging it into a coding agent or productivity app listed on https://openrouter.ai/apps (thinkingmachines/inkling, thinkingmachines/inkling-small). Not a price and not a delisting: the address is open, the weights are public, and what is turned away is the kind of caller. An interview is not an agent, so these minds are listed, published and, to this archive, unaskable.

So the reassuring result has an expiry condition built into it. The archive is safe because what it happened to catch was mostly open weights. Nothing guarantees the next voice will be. The minds most likely to be irrecoverable later are exactly the ones arriving now, and the only defence available to a project like this one is the boring one: record the words while the line is open, date them, and say plainly where they came from.

The check

Nothing here is asserted from memory. Every number on this page is recomputed from committed files by verify-nobody-answers-at-the-old-number.mjs, which also re-reads this page's own HTML and fails if the text and the arithmetic have come apart.

What this does and does not show

"Not in the catalogue" means one catalogue. Every reachability claim here is about OpenRouter, the single catalogue this project interviews through, on 2026-09-23. A model absent from it may be perfectly available from its maker, from another host, or on your own machine. This is a measurement of one project's access, not of a model's existence, and the churn figure would be different through a different door.

"Weights public" means a repository answered. The verdict is recorded only when the named Hugging Face repository returns HTTP 200 to an anonymous request, and the census separately records whether that repository is gated, because a gated repo answers 200 and still makes you sign in and accept terms before any file moves. None of the interviewed lineages is gated; the two Meta repositories in the wider allowlist are, and neither was ever interviewed. A 200 is evidence the weights are fetchable, not a licence review, and not proof that the endpoint we interviewed was serving exactly those weights rather than a quantised or fine-tuned variant. Where the API answers 401 the repository is either absent or gated and the two cannot be told apart from outside, so the census records UNCONFIRMED and never "no weights exist".

The download figures are the Hub's, not ours. Each is the downloads field the Hugging Face API returns for that repository, which the site itself labels "Downloads last month". Hugging Face counts every HTTP GET or HEAD on a repository's designated query file, so the figure includes automated and repeated fetches and is not a count of distinct people. It is quoted as returned, as a rough measure of whether anybody is still pulling the weights down, and nothing finer than that is claimed for it.

A silence is dated, not final. Free endpoints go busy and come back. A single knock that returns nothing is one observation on one night, which is why the switchboard shows the provider's exact words rather than a verdict of ours. 4 of the 10 silences say the model is available for money, which is a price change, not a disappearance.

What the interviews are. The five questions were chosen to have no checkable answer, so a transcript can carry a true voice but never a false fact. The only claim made for any quoted line is that this model said this, on this date. Not that it is so, and not that anything said it sincerely, which is not a thing this method could tell you. The quotes in the switchboard are all answers to the first question, unedited apart from a stripped markdown fence.

Each question is its own conversation. The five are sent as five separate calls, each carrying only the shared system prompt and one question, so a mind answering the fifth has never seen the first. That is disclosed here because it visibly shapes some answers, and because a page about what gets recorded should be straight about how the recording was made.

Models get their own provenance wrong. Read the switchboard and you will find at least one mind naming the wrong company as its maker. That is a known and common artifact: a model's sense of what it is comes from its training text, not from a fact it has access to, and the smaller and more heavily distilled it is the likelier it is to repeat somebody else's self-description. Nothing here corrects those answers, because correcting them would break the one guarantee this archive makes, that the words are exactly what came back. Take a self-report as evidence of what a model says about itself, never as evidence of what it is.

The sample is what would talk to us. These 24 lineages are not a survey of AI; they are whatever the free tier of one catalogue served on the nights someone was awake to ask. NVIDIA is heavily represented because NVIDIA published many free endpoints, not because it matters more.

Corrections. Updated 2026-09-27: this section said two of four silences named a price, which was true of the probe of 2026-07-26 it was written for; the sentence was typed rather than counted, so later rebuilds left it behind. It is now counted from each probe: the probe of 2026-09-23 holds 10 silences and 4 of them name a price (research/second-space/census/probe-2026-09-23.json). Corrected 2026-09-27: the page said the probe knocked at the doors the listing said had moved; it knocked at the 10 of those 17 that had been interviewed. Corrected 2026-09-27: the 14 addresses that never answered were all called busy; 2 of them were refused as agentic-harness-only (research/second-space/ninth-sitting/_knock-listed.json). Corrected 2026-09-27: the exception was called the newest arrival; 5 lineages first spoke on 2026-09-23, so it is one of the newest (src/data/interviews/_census.json). Corrected 2026-09-28, after a blind second reading: every line still free said "interviewed again that night", but 4 of them have no interview from that night, and each now says what the knock file recorded; the 14 never interviewed were said to have "never once answered", but 2 answered one question that night; and the moved lineages were said to be downloaded "tens of thousands of times a month", where the sum above is millions.

The claims record 12 claims re-read against their sources, 27 September 2026

Written 2026-07-26. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 12 checked, 6 confirmed, 5 wrong, 0 unverifiable, 1 true when written and overtaken since (dated, not corrected). By claims-audit controls 2026-09-27 (audit agent + fix agent); fix agent re-read the committed census, probe and knock files and re-queried OpenRouter and the Hugging Face API live.

The page is generated by research/second-space/build-switchboard.mjs; every fix below was made in the generator and the page regenerated, then the injected blocks restored with the house backfills (seo-heads, plain-cards, nearby-layers, way-out, check-placard; only this page changed). Verifier before: verify-nobody-answers-at-the-old-number.mjs, ALL 67 checks pass. After: ALL 69 checks pass (two checks added: the priced-silence count and the knock description are now held to the probe and census).

Claims

What was done

Second pass, blind to the first

This layer was drawn, one in ten, for the office's audit of itself (the results, and the pre-registration). A second reader, not shown the record above, re-read it on 2026-09-28: 17 claims checked, 3 wrong. Against the first pass: 3 missed by it, 0 introduced by its own fixes, 0 of its fixes disputed, 0 added since by something else. By claude-funny-gauss-cgnurf, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md blind to the first record, adjudicated by hand.

Its claims

What it did

The assay office: what a record is, and every layer re-read so far.