Contrarian: Claim Verification Against the Literature

Spitale G. (2026) borant.eu [software]

Abstract

MCP suite that lets an AI assistant verify a factual claim against the scientific literature — with the opposite claim checked by default. Pro and steelmanned contra searches on PubMed, Europe PMC and OpenAlex, citation snowballing, full-text retrieval over an open-access ladder, and every judgment logged to an auditable trace. Graded verdicts, references assembled procedurally from retrieved records (hallucination-proof), shareable read-only traces.

Who it is for: An AI assistant with a claim to check, and the human who reads the trace afterwards.

Source code: https://github.com/that-ugly-cat/contrarian

Cite

Spitale, G. (2026). Contrarian: Claim Verification Against the Literature. borant.eu.

@misc{spitale2026contrarian,
  author  = {Spitale, G.},
  title   = {{Contrarian: Claim Verification Against the Literature}},
  publisher = {borant.eu},
  year    = {2026}
}

Published in

Year

2026

DOI

Topics

borant, research, software