Shadow Assumption
NOUN · AI PROVENANCE
A shadow assumption is a hidden assumption buried inside a claim that looks confirmed or soundly inferred — an unstated premise the agent never surfaced as its own node. On the surface the claim reads as grounded. Underneath, it rests on something nobody verified and nobody can see.
In plain language
"The document is still current." "The API returned complete data." "The listing would say if the business had closed." Premises like these hold up enormous conclusions — and they almost never get their own line item. They live inside other claims, invisible, unverified, and load-carrying. That's a shadow assumption: not a lie, just a dependency nobody declared.
Provenance graphs are hostile territory for them, because a Thread forces premises to become nodes — and every node has to declare what it is. The shadow assumption's natural habitat is prose. Its natural predator is structure.
See it live
In most decks, founder conviction ships dressed up as market analysis — a shadow assumption in the making. Thread TT-0001 surfaces ours instead: an unrecorded, unverifiable node, colored gray, on the record.
Inspect that node in Thread TT-0001 →Related terms
TERM COINED BY TRUSTTHREAD · FIRST PUBLISHED 2026-07-12 · DEFINITION V1 · THIS PAGE IS THE CANONICAL SOURCE