AI Agent for Fact Checking Documents
Reports, proposals, product pages and regulatory filings make hundreds of factual statements, and most review processes check only the ones a reviewer happens to doubt. This agent extracts each claim from a draft, looks for it in the sources your organisation has approved and in the documents the draft cites, and returns a verdict for every statement: supported, contradicted or unverified, with the evidence passage and a confidence score so a reviewer knows where to look first.
What is an AI fact checker?
An AI fact checker is a governed software worker that verifies the factual claims in a document. It extracts each checkable statement, searches the sources an organisation has approved along with any documents the draft cites, and returns a verdict of supported, contradicted or unverified, with the evidence passage and a confidence score, for a reviewer to act on.
What it does
What it is not
Hundreds of claims per document and a reviewer who checks a handful
Factual errors in business documents rarely come from one big mistake. They come from a figure copied out of last year’s deck, a product capability that was quietly dropped, or a citation that does not say what the sentence claims, and drafts produced with AI writing tools add statements that nobody on the team actually wrote.
Review is selective
Reviewers check the numbers that look surprising and pass the ones that look familiar, which is exactly how an outdated figure survives.
Citations go unread
A footnote points to a real document, but nobody opens it to confirm that the page actually supports the sentence above it.
Sources disagree
The sales deck, the product sheet and the finance report give three different numbers, and the draft used whichever one the writer found first.
Generated text adds risk
Drafts written with AI help can contain confident statements with no source at all, mixed in with sentences that are well supported.
Every statement checked against the sources you trust
Extraction
Every Claim Pulled Out Of The Draft
Facts separated from opinion.
The draft is split into individual checkable statements, such as figures, dates, product capabilities, regulatory references and attributions, while opinions and forward-looking language are set aside. Each claim keeps its location in the document, so the verdict can be placed next to the sentence it belongs to.
- Figures, dates and names extracted
- Opinion and forecasts set aside
- Tables checked as well as prose
- Each claim keeps its location
With page and line
Verification
Checked Against Approved And Cited Sources
Your sources, ranked first.
Each claim is searched in the knowledge sources your administrators have approved, such as the finance pack, product documentation and policy library, and every citation in the draft is opened and read. Claims are compared across sources, so a statement backed by one document but contradicted by another is flagged as contested rather than passed.
Conflicts surfaced
Verdicts
A Verdict, The Evidence And A Confidence Score
Reviewers start with the weakest.
Every claim receives a verdict of supported, contradicted or unverified, with the passage that decided it and a confidence score. The report is ordered so contradicted and low-confidence claims come first, and a reviewer accepts, corrects or overrides each one before the document moves on.
Contradictions first
How the AI Fact Checker runs a task
- STEP 01
Load the draft
The document is read from Word, PDF or a shared library, including its tables and footnotes, and broken into individual statements. Figures, dates, names, product capabilities and references to regulations or studies are kept as claims, while opinions, plans and forecasts are labelled and set aside.
Document parsingTable extractionClaim extraction - STEP 02
Find the evidence
Each claim is searched across the sources your administrators approved for this agent, such as Confluence spaces, SharePoint libraries and Drive folders, and figures can be looked up in a reporting database with read-only queries. Results are reranked, and the user’s own access rights limit what can be read.
Approved sourcesRead-only SQLReranking - STEP 03
Open the citations
Where the draft cites a document, that document is opened and the cited passage is located. The agent records whether the source exists, whether it contains the statement and whether it supports or contradicts it, which catches references that are real but say something different.
Citation checkPassage location - STEP 04
Weigh and score
Claims backed by one source are cross-checked against others to surface disagreement, and each one is given a verdict: supported, contradicted or unverified. A confidence score with a short rationale is attached, and anything below your threshold is marked for human review.
Cross-checkVerdictConfidence score - STEP 05
Report to the reviewer
A claim register and an annotated copy of the draft go to the named reviewer, ordered with contradictions and low-confidence verdicts first. The reviewer accepts, corrects or overrides each item, and those decisions are kept with the evidence so the next reviewer can see what was checked.
Claim registerAnnotated draftReviewer decision
Systems the AI Fact Checker connects to
Approved sources
Verification
Inputs, outputs and runtime
- Ingests
- Draft documentApproved source listCited referencesReporting database viewsConfidence threshold
- Produces
- Claim register with verdictsEvidence passage per claimAnnotated draftConfidence scoresReviewer decision log
- Triggered by
- Draft submitted for reviewPre-publication checkAI-drafted text received
- Human oversight
- A reviewer accepts or corrects each verdict
- Models
- Open-weight LLMs you host
- Typical latency
- Minutes for a typical report
- Deployment
- On-premise or private cloud
- Data residency
- Drafts and sources stay in your network
Where teams use an AI fact checker
Annual Report Review
Check figures and statements in the narrative sections against the finance team’s approved numbers before the report goes to the board.
Proposal And Bid Checks
Confirm that capability claims, references and credentials in a proposal match what the organisation can actually evidence.
Marketing Claim Substantiation
Test product and performance claims in campaign copy against the documentation that legal and product teams approved.
Regulatory Submission Review
Verify that every regulation cited in a filing exists in the version referenced and says what the submission claims it says.
AI Draft Verification
Check text produced by writing assistants or chat tools before anyone relies on it, with unsupported sentences highlighted.
Policy Consistency
Compare statements in a new policy with existing policies and standards to catch contradictions before publication.
AI Fact Checker vs chatbots and SaaS copilots
A fact check is only worth having if it is checked against something, and for business documents that something is the organisation’s own approved record rather than whatever a model absorbed in training or a public search happens to rank first.
| Generic chatbot | SaaS copilot | VDF AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sources used | Training data | Web and open files | Your approved sources |
| Coverage | Claims it notices | Selected passages | Every checkable claim |
| Citations | Not opened | Sometimes opened | Opened and read |
| Conflicting sources | Not shown | Not shown | Flagged as contested |
| No evidence found | Often answers anyway | Varies | Marked unverified |
| Verdict record | Chat history | None | Claim register kept |
| Where drafts go | Vendor service | Vendor cloud | Stays in your network |
Governance and controls
The fact checker is itself a model making judgements, so every verdict has to show its evidence, every uncertain one has to reach a person, and the record has to make clear that a human, not the agent, approved the published text.
Evidence shown
Each verdict quotes its source
Approved sources only
Admins choose what counts as evidence
Confidence threshold
Low scores go to a reviewer
No silent edits
The draft is annotated, not rewritten
Role-based access
Sources read with user permissions
Agent activity logged
Checks and reviewer decisions audited
Evidence it leaves behind
What reviewers notice after rollout
Who runs the AI Fact Checker
Corporate communications lead
Sends the annual report narrative through a claim-by-claim check against finance’s approved figures and sees the three numbers that no longer match before the board pack is printed, not after a director spots them.
Bid manager
Confirms that every credential, reference project and capability statement in a proposal is backed by an internal record, so the submission does not promise something delivery teams cannot show.
Regulatory affairs specialist
Checks that each regulation cited in a submission exists in the version referenced and supports the sentence that cites it, with the evidence passages saved alongside the final filing.
Questions about the AI Fact Checker
What is an AI fact checker?
It is an agent that checks the factual statements in a document. It extracts each claim, searches your approved sources and the documents the draft cites, compares what those sources say, and returns a verdict of supported, contradicted or unverified with the evidence passage and a confidence score for a reviewer.
How is an AI fact checker different from a generic chatbot?
Asking a chatbot whether a document is accurate gets an opinion from a model that cannot see your finance pack or product documentation. This agent checks each claim against the sources your organisation approved, opens every citation, shows the passage behind each verdict, and says unverified when it finds no evidence.
Can an AI fact checker run on-premise on internal source data?
Yes. Drafts awaiting a fact check are often unreleased results, bids or filings, and the sources used to check them are internal. Extraction, retrieval and verdicts all run on servers you control, and web search is only available if your administrators grant that tool to the agent.
What does an AI fact checker produce, and in what format?
A claim register listing every checkable statement with its location, verdict, evidence passage, source and confidence score; an annotated copy of the draft with contradicted and unverified claims highlighted; and a summary for the reviewer, delivered as Word and Excel files.
Where does an AI fact checker fit in a governed AI programme?
It checks; people correct and approve. Deciding how to fix a contradicted claim, whether an unverified statement can stay and when a document is ready to publish remains with the author and the reviewer. Measuring the answer quality of a RAG system in bulk is a separate evaluation task.
How accurate is an AI fact checker?
It is as reliable as the sources it checks against and the reviewer who reads its output. Verdicts come with the passage that decided them and a confidence score, so a reviewer can confirm a ruling quickly, and anything below your threshold is sent to a person. When no evidence is found, the claim is marked unverified rather than passed.
Can the fact checker verify claims against the public web?
Only if your administrators grant it the web search tool, which is a deliberate choice because the claim text is then sent to a search provider. You might leave it off for confidential drafts and allow it for public-facing copy, where checking a quoted statistic against its original publisher is useful.
Does it check text written by other AI tools?
Yes, and that is one of the most useful places to run it. Text from writing assistants and chat tools can mix well-supported sentences with confident statements that have no source, and checking every claim against your approved sources separates the two before anyone signs off.
Which VDF AI tools does the fact checker use?
It combines four verification tools from the VDF AI tool registry: fact check for the verdict, citation verify for cited sources, source cross-check for conflicting evidence and answer confidence score for routing uncertain items to people. Retrieval tools supply the evidence from your approved knowledge sources.
Is there a free AI fact checker I can try?
The VDF AI Cloud Free plan lets you try the agent on documents that are not confidential. Checking unreleased reports or filings against internal sources is better suited to the on-premises edition, where drafts and evidence stay inside your network; the plans are listed on the pricing page.
Check every claim before the document goes out
See the AI Fact Checker test a draft against your approved sources.