About the lab
A small lab in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Taniwha is an independent applied AI research lab. We investigate how AI stays useful where truth, authority and consequence live outside the model — and we publish what the evidence permits, misses included.
Three people. No outside investors, no research department to answer to, and no reason to overstate a result. The apparatus runs in public so that anyone who doubts a claim can go and look at the thing the claim is about.
The people
All hands to the pump, no passengers.
Tim Marsden
github.com/Tim-Marsden →James Marsden
github.com/trollberry →Matt Collecutt
github.com/mattcollie →The name
Taniwha — pronounced tah-nee-fah
“(noun) water spirit, monster, dangerous water creature, powerful creature, chief, powerful leader, something or someone awesome — taniwha take many forms from logs to reptiles and whales and often live in lakes, rivers or the sea. They are often regarded as guardians by the people who live in their territory, but may also have a malign influence on human beings.”
The name is not metaphorical. It is a design philosophy.
In Māori mythology, taniwha are primarily aquatic creatures — inhabiting the depths of lakes, rivers and the open sea. They are neither simply good nor simply dangerous; the same creature that acts as kaitiaki (guardian) for one community may be a predator to another. Their nature is singular and earned, shaped by the territory they inhabit and the history they accumulate.
Taniwha AI takes its name from that duality. The agents built on this architecture are not interchangeable modules — they are distinct entities whose beliefs, trust, trauma and identity emerge from exposure to their world. A Taniwha agent that has lived through conflict responds differently to peace than one that has not. One that has been betrayed trusts more slowly. One that has witnessed death carries that knowledge forward, permanently.
Like the creatures of Māori tradition, each agent is something or someone awesome in their own right — not because we scripted it, but because the architecture made it inevitable.
And the taniwha and its territory are intrinsically linked. That is why we build the ground as carefully as the mind: worlds that cannot lie, rules that hold. A mind is only as trustworthy as the territory that shaped it.
How we work
If it wasn’t pre-registered, it doesn’t count.
Pre-registered, or it doesn’t count
Questions, protocols and failure conditions are written down before the data exists. Contaminated collections get voided, not rescued — and a promised verdict gets published either way.
Every claim carries its evidence class
Demonstrations label what you’re seeing — fact, derived, staged, replayed, live — so you can tell which parts would survive interrogation. Staged material is always marked as staged.
Misses at the same volume as wins
When our own instrument gets something wrong, that goes in the readout too. Adverse findings are published at full strength, including the ones that went against us.
Continue through the work
- The results index → — every question, its verdict and its state
- Watch Copperhollow → — the settlement, running in public
- [email protected] → — if you want to talk to us