A mayor in the Philippines cut down a protected mangrove forest to build a parking lot. When the community confronted him, he said it had always looked like that. A year earlier, @GainForestNow had measured every tree there. 2,567 were missing. The community took the data to court, and the mangroves were replanted. My conversation with @dwddao, co-founder and chief scientist of GainForest is live on @opencommonspod. We get into who should own nature's data, AI that helps people govern, and what open source really requires.

Our SF Tech Week happy hour at Novela, led by our Director of Events & Community @its_mils_, was one for the books 📚 Thanks to @WithAmpersand, @rootlyhq, @gauge_sh, and all the builders who stopped by to share notes on enterprise agents and open-source AGI!

Good news for anyone trying to prove a model is theirs. Sentient Foundation released the Fingerprinting Leaderboard, a free, open source benchmark that tests fingerprinting methods, meant to prove an AI model was copied from yours. Researchers submit a method for hiding an ownership mark inside a model, and Sentient puts that mark into its own test models, tries to strip it out, then ranks the method on a public website. The code that runs these tests, called mlprints, is released too. A fingerprint trains a model to return unlikely answers to secret prompts, so an owner can test a suspected copy through its API alone. But a fingerprint that survives every attack is still useless if the owner can’t read it back reliably. Sentient Foundation’s Fingerprinting Leaderboard scores that verification step directly, alongside how well the mark resists removal and how much model skill it costs. Sentient’s Perinucleus method embedded 24,576 fingerprints in Llama-3.1-8B without degrading utility, is also competing on the leaderboard, and the fingerprints survived standard fine-tuning.

Own your intelligence stack, folks! If you train or fine-tune your own models, you also need a way to prove they are yours once the weights are out in the world. Model fingerprinting does this. The Fingerprinting Leaderboard from @Sentient_found is an open benchmark for these methods. It scores each one on how much model quality it keeps, how well it survives removal attempts, and how reliably the owner can detect it.