Methodology

How the research
actually gets made.

Six protocols that make production telemetry safe to study and credible to cite.

Read-only, metadata-first

Connectors fetch model + token-count + timestamp + content fingerprint. Trace contents stay inside the contributor's observability platform until they approve a specific batch for inclusion in a study.

Three-pass redaction

All three passes run on our servers after the contributor approves a batch. (1) deterministic detector (regex + dictionaries for emails, phones, addresses, IDs, secrets), (2) 12-class ML classifier for names, payment info, and ambiguous PII, (3) human review queue for anything either automated pass flagged.

Domain-weighted sampling

Contributions are stratified by domain so the corpus reflects production reality across verticals — not just the high-volume ones. Multipliers (Medicine 4×, Legal 3×, …) make rare data worth contributing. Recomputed quarterly from subscriber demand.

Embargoed publication

Subscribers receive studies during a 120-day embargo before public release. After embargo, the study + abstracted data is published openly. Buyer category disclosed per study; specific subscribers withheld.

Provider-terms clean

Contributors own their prompts and completions. GOAT labs licenses rights for research use only — never for model training or fine-tuning. Compatible with the standard data-portability terms of every major model provider.

Reproducibility log

Every study cites its slice of the corpus by stable batch IDs. Within the embargo, subscribers can re-run our metrics against the same slice via our reproducibility CLI.