Minimum Trust Panel Spec

Status: first pass

The Trust Panel is the Viewer-facing way to inspect product transparency before relying on product information, recommendations, reports, or agent output. It must show the work behind material claims without implying Surface certification, a trust score, or a universal action decision.

Scope

A minimum Trust Panel reads a Trust Snapshot or current TrustReport and renders:

• the subject or product output being inspected
• material claims about that subject
• current claim status using product labels
• evidence and evidence visibility for each material claim
• freshness, conflicts, and transparency gaps
• trace and integrity references when supplied
• available producer-owned reverification or access-request capabilities

The panel may be embedded in a product, opened from a product detail page, or exposed as a standalone local view. Hosted Surface services are optional and must not be required to understand the trust state.

Required Claim States

The panel must map current API statuses to human labels without changing the underlying contract:

• verified -> Verified
• stale -> Needs refresh
• disputed -> Disputed
• rejected -> Rejected
• unknown -> No evidence
• pending or review-oriented producer state -> Pending review

Surface must not collapse these states into a single trust score. Producers may add explanatory labels, but they must not redefine core status meanings.

Required Sections

1. Summary: subject, generated time, producer, schema version, and status counts.
2. Material claims: claim label, subject, asserted field or behavior, value, impact, owner when supplied, and policy link when supplied.
3. Evidence: evidence summary, type, method, source, observed time, result when supplied, and visibility state.
4. Trace: evidence trace, authority trace, execution metadata, and integrity references when supplied.
5. Gaps and conflicts: missing evidence, private or unavailable evidence, stale evidence, contradictory claims, disputed claims, and unsupported inferences when supplied by producer policy.
6. Actions: producer-owned reverification, evidence access request, or escalation links when advertised.

Current Implementation Names

Use current field names only where exact technical reference requires them:

• TrustReport remains the current report contract; product docs may call the projected view a Trust Snapshot.
• transparencyGaps remains the current typed report gap field; product docs should present these as Transparency Gaps or Conflicts.
• claimGroups remains the current grouping field; product docs should present these as Claim Groups or producer-defined views.
• surface remains a producer-defined grouping or namespace on claims, not the primary evaluated object.

Non-Goals

• no Surface certification badge
• no opaque trust score
• no hosted-only panel requirement
• no Surface-owned evidence collection
• no guarantee that the user or agent should act