Checking the receipts: will OpenAI's system cards explain why models can reason without a chain of thought?

No new claim enters the ledger this week. This edition only returns to three earlier SecondSource calls that were due for settling, and none of the three can be judged. The first bears on the security and compliance chiefs who clear AI agents for deployment: OpenAI's October 26 system card gives no cause for the change in the model's chain-of-thought abilities, so the card offers those chiefs no evidence on cause.

Will OpenAI's next system card explain why models can reason without a chain of thought? Can't judge: the October 26 GPT-6.1 Terra system card says only that the model is less able than its predecessor to rewrite its chain of thought on instruction. The card gives no cause for that drop, and nowhere does it mention reasoning without a chain of thought. SecondSource's October 22 call was that this card would give a cause for the rewriting ability alone. The card also drops an assurance from OpenAI's September GPT-6 Astra system card: that the change in rewriting ability was not specifically caused by architecture changes. See the receipts →

Will Anthropic's enterprise market share fall to 35% or below? Can't judge: this question waits on the next enterprise report from Menlo Ventures, a venture firm that is also an Anthropic investor. The question originally ran to September 30 and got 30 more days, to October 30, and Menlo Ventures' article index still lists no new edition. The latest edition remains the December 2025 report, which estimated Anthropic's share of the enterprise large-model market at 40%, the baseline for this question. See the receipts →

Will the US-China frontier AI capability gap land between 4 and 14 months the next time Epoch AI publishes it? Can't judge: Epoch AI, the research group that publishes this measure, had released no new gap figure by October 31. The designated page still shows the January 2026 version. Converted from Epoch AI's capability index, that version has Chinese frontier models trailing US ones by 7 months on average, with a smallest gap of 4 months and a largest of 14. See the receipts →

All of SecondSource's calls and their verdict dates → the judgment index

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