The model can be wrong. The world keeps the record.
Taniwha is an applied AI research lab. We investigate how AI can remain useful inside systems where truth, authority and consequence exist independently of the model.
01 · Watch
Open the settlement
Two minutes, no account. A world of thirty-seven minds accepting, deriving and refusing in public.
Watch Copperhollow →02 · Read
The measured result
One claim, one number, one limit — and the paper it came from, with the adverse findings left in.
Read the result →03 · Use
Install what ships
Ārai, if your coding agent read the rules and did it anyway. Hīkoi, if you want a world on your own machine.
See what ships →The latest result
Where reliability lives
Cognitive and institutional reliability were experimentally separable. Five pre-declared properties held across every tested trajectory while the cognition was ablated, killed, reset and wholesale-substituted.
What this is not
One world, one constitution, one comparator model. It does not show cognition is unimportant — and the pre-registered cell where the substituted model panel beat our own architecture is published at full strength.
How it works
Three planes. One thesis.
We investigate how artificial intelligence can remain useful inside systems where truth, authority and consequence exist independently of the model.
Ground
EVIDENCEDA world the model cannot overwrite.
In the programme this is epistemic containment.
Mind
EXISTENCE PROOFAgents that believe, trust — and can be wrong.
In the programme this is architectural composition.
Apparatus · Copperhollow / Hīkoi
Walk the ground. Watch the settlement.
Hīkoi is our first-person viewer for Kano worlds — and its window on Copperhollow, the live settlement where thirty-seven minds work, wander, and get refused on an authoritative world. The apparatus runs in public; nothing here is a mock-up.
One zip: a generated planet, a first-person walk, and an MCP server your own AI can interrogate — no account, no network.
Get Hīkoi on GitHub → Explore Kano →What ships today
Two you can run now. One that isn’t ready.
All three came out of the grounding and enforcement experiments — transferred research, not a separate product line.
Ārai
Open-source enforcement for coding-agent rules
Your agent read the rules and did it anyway. Ārai enforces them before execution, whether the model remembered or not.
Ships now — open source
Hīkoi
A first-person viewer and window into Kano worlds
An offline planet and an MCP server. Walk the world yourself, then let your AI query the same ground.
Download now
Kete
Organisation-level policy enforcement and audit
Ārai across a whole organisation, with an audit trail that survives the session and Pono as the ground under it.
Closed alpha — not taking signups
Everything else — research systems, instruments and demonstrations — is on the status map, honestly labelled.
The lab
Three people in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Independent, with no outside investors and no reason to overstate a result. Questions get pre-registered before the run; findings get published with the misses included.
The name is not metaphorical — a taniwha is shaped by the territory it inhabits, and so is a mind. The full account of the name →
Who
- Tim Marsden Tim-Marsden →
- James Marsden trollberry →
- Matt Collecutt mattcollie →