An AI that is not allowed to invent the law
Ask an ordinary assistant about tenancy law and it replies from recollection, which is how invented statute numbers end up in front of people. This one has no such freedom. It receives a closed set of records, may point only at those, and any attribution beyond them is cut from the text before rendering.
What happens between your question and the answer
Five stages, in a fixed order, every time.
Classify
Your question is sorted: which jurisdiction it concerns, which subject it falls under, whether it is a comparison between two places. This decides what gets fetched.
Retrieve
Matching records are pulled from a curated body of primary material — statute, regulation and agency guidance. Nothing outside that body is available to the model.
Verify
Each retrieved record is checked before it is used. Where a record's address fails to load, it is withheld rather than presented as though it carried weight.
Ground
The surviving records are handed over with a handle apiece, and the instruction is explicit: reference the handles you were given, never invent a statute number, never cite anything else.
Cite, then strip
This is the stage that matters. The reply is scanned and every reference outside the supplied set is removed by strip_unknown_citations before you ever see the text.
Why a deletion step rather than a warning
The usual mitigation is a disclaimer: this may be inaccurate, verify independently. Disclaimers move the risk onto the reader, who is precisely the person least equipped to spot a plausible-sounding statute that does not exist.
Deleting the unattributable text instead makes the failure visible rather than convincing. An answer with a gap in it prompts you to ask again. An answer with a confident fabrication in it prompts you to act on something untrue, in front of a landlord, about your home.
That is why this is engineering rather than policy. A rule about what the model should do is a hope. A function that removes what it should not have said is a guarantee, and it runs on every reply without anybody remembering to apply it.
The price is a flatter tool than a free-running assistant. It stops short wherever the material stops. We consider that the correct trade for a subject where being wrong loses somebody their tenancy.
What an answer looks like
Shortened, but the shape is exact: every claim carries its handle.
Try it on your own situation in the Resource Center. It is free, it needs no account, and the sources it names are the same ones you can open yourself.
