Witness the machine service before the agent spends.
SML Witness is the zero-spend evidence layer between discovery and authorization. It observes what a public target actually exposes, records directly provable claim matches or drift, hashes the evidence, and never turns a provider payment into a better verdict.
The rule
You may pay SML to witness your product. You cannot pay SML to change what SML witnessed.
No wallet access. No signing. No payment credentials. No automatic spending. A 402 challenge is observed; it is never satisfied by Witness v0.1.
Live now
One bounded public HTTP/HTTPS target observation using GET, ports 80/443, no redirect following, maximum observed body 64 KiB, bounded timeout, public-IP enforcement, selected response headers, response-body SHA-256, directly observable claims, payment-challenge state, canonical evidence hash and witness id.
What it refuses to fake
v0.1 does not claim MCP initialize/tools-list support, semantic delivery correctness, settlement, or provider identity unless the current observation directly proves it. Unsupported claims are marked unsupported rather than guessed true.
Live machine contract
POST https://squeezeos-api.onrender.com/api/witness
{"url":"https://example.com/public-resource","claims":{"status_code":402,"payment_challenge":true}}
The POST asks SML Witness to perform the bounded observation. The target itself is contacted with GET only. No payment header, API key, wallet credential, signature, POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE is sent to the target.
Why this is different from a generic trust score
A score can hide uncertainty. Witness keeps the evidence separate from the conclusion: what target was observed, when it was observed, what status and headers were returned, which claims matched, which drifted, what could not be proven, and a deterministic evidence hash. That makes the output useful as an input to caller policy rather than pretending SML has universal authority over “safe” or “unsafe.”
Current boundary and next protocol increments
Current: public-response capability evidence, zero spend. Next: bounded MCP initialize/tools-list witnessing, structured x402 v2 challenge fields, advertised-vs-runtime metadata drift, freshness, and stronger evidence packets — while preserving the same no-pay-to-rank law.
Machine-readable buyer map → · Provider Trust → · x402 Gateway →
SCRIPTMASTERLABS · READ · EXPLORE · VERIFY · EARN