Corpus commitment: pre-execution decision records from an LLM research-screening funnel (stage 0)

This is a cryptographic commitment to a dataset, not the dataset. It fixes the contents of a per-decision record from an operating LLM research-screening funnel in advance of that record being released in stages, so that records published later can be verified as having been fixed at this date rather than authored to fit a result. Commitment q6/v1 sha256-merkle root=7e1f5795a5814adf391a7442b9c5e9e81527cd0c21ac57b266d09db3c0b011bc n=285 window=2026-06-07..2026-07-28 Merkle leaves are salted — sha256(0x00 || nonce || canonical_json(record)) with a 32-byte per-record nonce revealed only on release — because a decision record is low-entropy and an unsalted leaf would be brute-forceable by guessing plausible records. Interior nodes are domain-separated, odd nodes are promoted rather than duplicated, and the leaf count is published alongside the root so records cannot be added or dropped undetected. The bundled OpenTimestamps proof is complete, anchored to Bitcoin block headers 960348 and 960419. Verify with ots verify COMMITMENT.txt.ots; check file integrity with sha256sum -c MANIFEST.sha256. This deposit does not contain the decision records. Release is staged deliberately: publication is an irreversible contamination event for any later experiment run on the same artifacts, so the corpus is committed now and released once the experiments that depend on its being unseen are locked. A permanently withheld stratum keeps clean future replays possible. Subsequent stages will publish the records themselves, each with a per-record Merkle inclusion proof checkable against the root committed here. Interpretive caveat. The committed records are pre-execution decisions — proposals that were generated and declined. Nothing was executed, so no rejection here is a verified null. The funnel admitted zero candidates, and a zero-admission record identifies only the product of the underlying base rate and the screen's sensitivity: it bounds the joint (world, screen), never the world alone. Not investment advice.