How these briefings were made

Every briefing on the AI-Generated Economic Briefings page was written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, using Briefwright, the briefing engine Jason Furman built for Econvitals in September 2026; what it writes is called an Economic Briefing. It replaced four earlier tools he had built for the same job: a literature dossier, a topic briefing, a country briefing and an empirical briefing. This page explains, in plain terms, what the system does and what it does not do.

One request, one run

A briefing starts as a written request on a form: a question to answer, a paper to extend, or a piece to critique, plus the person’s choices about how much evidence to gather, how long the briefing should be and how carefully it should be checked. The form suggests a plan in plain English, and the person can accept it or change the dials. They can also let Claude ask a few clarifying questions first. After that, an always-on Mac in Jason’s home runs the whole job unattended. From that moment nobody touches the work. A typical briefing takes a few hours; the finished one is emailed to the requester.

That is what “one-shot” means here. There is no back-and-forth during the build and no editing by Jason. Nobody reviews the briefing before it is delivered or posted.

Three kinds of evidence

A request can draw on up to three sources of evidence, and the form shows which ones ran on each briefing:

The literature. Academic papers, and optionally think-tank and central-bank research, found by searching, downloaded, read and summarized with each claim tied to the page it came from.
The commentary. What forecasters, research desks, the press and blogs have been saying, drawn from the same stream of commentary that feeds Jason’s daily and weekly briefings.
Our own numbers. Calculations Claude runs itself on official data — the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, the Treasury, FRED and a long list of other sources the system is connected to — with charts drawn in the Econvitals house style.

How the checking works

The design rule is that Claude never types a number that is a claim. Every figure and every quoted finding goes into a ledger first, with a receipt: the series or document it came from and the exact value read from it. The writer can only use ledger entries, through tokens that are resolved when the page is built. After the writing, two checks run: a mechanical one that re-reads every number from its source and fails the run if anything drifted, and a reverse sweep that reads the finished text sentence by sentence and confirms each one is backed by something in the ledger. A source nobody could open is marked unverified, never waved through. The result is rendered as an interactive web page and as a PDF from the same text, so the two cannot disagree.

Rules that never change

The author is Claude, and every briefing says so and that it may contain mistakes.
The person who asked for a briefing is never named. Their request is private.
Nobody edits a briefing after the run finishes. What you read is what the system produced.
Only briefings whose requester chose to post them appear here; most are delivered privately.
These briefings are not Jason’s views. Some were requested to test the system — for instance, grading a published forecast against what actually happened — rather than because he wanted the answer.

Where they come from

The Economic Briefing itself lives on a password-protected part of jasonfurman.org, where friends and family can request one. The copies here are the briefings that have been posted there, carried over automatically with their links repointed; there is deliberately no way to request a briefing from Econvitals, and the bundles of source papers that some briefings offer there are not carried over. Feedback and corrections are welcome at feedback@econvitals.org.