The pilot proved a single site. The platform has to prove a planet. Here's how Ghost Permits gets from Colossus-1 to an agent-powered accountability layer anyone can point at a pair of coordinates.
Today Ghost Permits is a hand-curated intelligence tool. It monitors three sites we believe matter, produces a written brief, and publishes the numbers for the public record.
Tomorrow it should be an infrastructure intelligence platform. The same orbital signals that catch a facility cutting corners can tell another facility where not to cut them — clean atmospheric headroom for faster permitting, adequate grid, stable ground, suitable cooling. xAI's Memphis problem (unpermitted turbines, federal lawsuit, community backlash) was predictable from orbit before a single permit was filed.
So we split the product without splitting the pipeline. Sentinel is the watchdog — accountability for the public. Compass is the site-intelligence system — due diligence for the industry. One satellite stack serves both. The watchdog stays free because the due-diligence product pays for it.
The same orbital signals flip direction. Sentinel asks “what's wrong here.” Compass asks “what's right for what I need.” Run the pipeline forward, you get a watchdog. Run it backward over a candidate-site grid, you get site intelligence. The data is identical; only the query changes.
Input: a coordinate, an address, a three-word tag, or a global scan.
Output: anomaly brief · permit gap · evidence packet · continuous watch.
Users: regulators, journalists, NGOs, law firms, downwind communities.
Input: facility class, power requirement, cooling profile, region of interest.
Output: ranked candidate sites scored on seven orbital dimensions · comparables study · risk map.
Users: hyperscalers, data-centre developers, energy companies, siting consultants, state economic-development offices.
The three independent signals — atmospheric chemistry, optical counting, permit paperwork — can be fused into an evidence score that holds up to scrutiny. A 184-day gap is legible. Boxtown knows what the sky already knew.
The Sentinel console exists; the methodology is public; the press kit is written. Ghost Permits works as a finished artefact about a specific case. That's the foundation everything else depends on.
Evidence briefs published for all three Colossus-adjacent sites with reproducible pipeline, open-source code, and cited data provenance.
Stop hard-coding sites. The Sentinel page accepts any input that resolves to a coordinate: lat/lon, address, what3words code, a Google Maps URL, a dragged pin. The full fusion brief runs on whatever the user points at.
Each investigated coordinate gets a memorable three-word tag — the product's what3words-style handle — so a reporter can share /site/ember-kiln-riverbank instead of a raw decimal pair. The tag is the unit of conversation; the coordinate is just what it resolves to.
Compass · concurrentPrivate alpha of the Compass console opens to three design partners at end of Q2. The same pipeline runs backward — enter a region + facility spec, receive a ranked shortlist. No public URL yet; invitation-only.
A user who has never seen Ghost Permits can paste any lat/lon, get a provisional brief in < 60 seconds, and share the result as a single URL.
One-off briefs are a feature; continuous watching is the product. Every dossier gets a “Track this” button. Once tracked, the pipeline reruns daily and the user is notified the moment the anomaly crosses a threshold, a permit gets filed, a news story drops, or a heat signature appears.
Alerts meet users where they already are — not in another tab. Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Slack, Discord webhook, RSS, ICS calendar, or a shareable status page with its own three-word URL.
Compass · alphaFirst three Compass design partners go live. They run region scans on real site-selection projects and give us feature telemetry in return. No public marketing yet — we learn what works before we name a price.
10,000 tracked sites across all delivery channels, median alert-to-delivery under 90 seconds, < 2% false-positive rate on threshold crossings.
A pin on a map doesn't tell you who owns the land, what's been filed with whom, what the local paper has written, or whether it's already in court. A human reporter spends days on that. An orchestrated agent swarm can do it in minutes — and cite every source.
We run a fleet of narrow agents (see next section), each owning one sub-question. A planner decomposes the user's input into tasks, dispatches, collects, deduplicates, and drafts. Nothing is published without a human pass — but the draft is ready when the human arrives.
This is where AskNews, Perplexity Sonar, and open-web retrieval enter as first-class data streams alongside the satellite feeds.
Compass · GACompass exits invite-only and opens as a paid product. Three design-partner contracts convert; two more hyperscalers and one state economic-development office sign. The money that funds the public tier starts landing.
A human investigator using Ghost Permits produces a publishable draft brief 5× faster than they do today, with every claim footnoted to a primary source.
Once the pipeline produces scored briefs for any coordinate and the agent fleet enriches them, Ghost Permits becomes a piece of critical civic infrastructure — and infrastructure needs an API, a contract, and a business model.
Newsrooms license a streaming endpoint: new anomalies in their beat, delivered as webhook events. Regulators run it in reverse: what permits are missing where combustion is already happening. Law firms pay for depositions-ready evidence packets with chain-of-custody metadata.
We stay free for the public. Power-users pay for the power.
Three anchor customers (one newsroom, one regulator, one law firm) on paid contracts; public product still operating at zero cost to the end user.
We don't trust a single model to run the investigation — we trust a fleet of narrow ones, each testable, each replaceable, each cited. The planner routes, the specialists fetch, the verifier double-checks, and the human signs. Three agents (Grid, Subsidence, Cooling, Comparables) serve Compass; the rest serve both modes.
Engineers for the agent fleet, data partners for permit feeds, an editorial lead for the review queue, a legal advisor for the correction policy, and anyone who's been downwind and wants to be early.