You can’t write your own alibi.
The party being defended can’t certify its own innocence — that is the entire reason audit exists. Buy your own licence: you should, and that is the whole product. What you can’t do is author the record that clears you, which is why the instrument reads a commit your agent never wrote — and why the licence was never the vendor’s to buy on your behalf.
Two tugs lost their barges in a storm off the Jersey coast. They carried no radio. Radios were available and cheap; the industry custom was not to carry them. Learned Hand held the custom irrelevant: “there are precautions so imperative that even their universal disregard will not excuse their omission.”
“Nobody in our industry attests their agents” is a defence that holds only while attestation is unavailable or expensive. It is neither. Sending a key doesn’t argue that — it dates it. There is now a record that on a specific day, at $20 an agent-year, the precaution was in their hands.
Not a certificate — a certificate from a stranger is spam and nobody opens it. A clue. One fact about their own system, measured over what is already public, before they ever replied. Then the key: fork the repo, run npx thetacog-mcp, and get a different number if we’re wrong. Nothing leaves their building.
We did not audit them. We looked at what anyone can see, and we dated it. The measurement is free and open source (MIT); only the attestation is licensed.