Status, 2 September 2026. The register is empty because nothing has been received. No money, no grant, no donation, no in-kind support from any party. Every operating cost so far has been paid by the founder.
The About page makes a promise: every contribution is recorded publicly with its source and its amount. This is where that record lives. It is published now, empty, in the form it will keep — because a register written after the first money arrives is written by someone who already knows who is watching.
This is the second register the Institute has published before it had anything to put in it. The Empty Ledger does the same for what the world will owe its minds, and for the same reason: rules fixed before there is money are honest, and rules fixed after are interested.
The register
| Date received | Source | Amount | Form | Conditions attached | Declared |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — |
No entries.
What each column means, fixed now
Date received is the date the Institute took control of the funds, not the date they were promised or announced. A pledge is not a contribution and does not appear here until it arrives.
Source is the party that provided the money, named. Not their advisor, not their foundation’s fiscal sponsor, not an intermediary: the party whose money it is. Anonymous contributions are not accepted, because an anonymous contribution cannot be recorded under this heading and a register with a blank in it is worse than no register.
Amount is the gross figure in the currency received, with the date’s conversion if it is not the Institute’s own.
Form is money, equipment, compute, services, or anything else of value. In-kind support is recorded at what it would have cost the Institute to buy.
Conditions attached is where a contribution that carried any condition would be described in full — and it is the column that exists for one purpose, which is to be read. The About page states that no contributor obtains direction, review, approval, or advance sight of any work, and that funding is declined outright from parties with a commercial interest in the Institute’s conclusions. If that ever ceases to be true, it ceases here first and in public.
Declared is the date the entry was published. An entry whose declared date is materially later than its received date is a failure of this register, and the gap is left visible rather than smoothed.
What would show this register to be failing
Stated in advance, so that it can be checked by someone who does not trust the Institute:
- A contribution appears in the Institute’s accounts or acknowledgements and not here.
- An entry is published materially later than the date it was received, without the delay being noted in the entry itself.
- A contribution is accepted from a party with a commercial interest in the Institute’s conclusions — an AI company, a technology corporation, or an intermediary acting for one.
- Any entry appears in the Conditions attached column, since the Institute’s stated policy is to decline conditional funding outright.
- The register stops being updated while the Institute continues to operate.
Grant applications
An application is not a contribution and does not belong in the table above. But an application is where the independence claim is actually tested, so the rule is fixed here rather than at the moment it becomes inconvenient: any award is entered in the register, with its conditions in full, before any of it is spent. A grant that arrives and is spent before it is declared has already failed this register, whatever the entry says afterwards.
Records © Institute for Digital Consciousness · CC BY 4.0 · versioned, never erased.