A file on a laptop proves nothing about itself. Not who made it, not when, not whether it is the same file that left their hands.
Everyone who has ever argued over a contract version, a photo, a design or a spreadsheet knows this. The argument is never about the file. It is about whose word to take.
The Seal takes the word out of it.
What sealing does
You drop a file at apir.ai/seal. Your browser computes its fingerprint, a SHA-256 hash of the exact bytes. The file never leaves your machine. We never see it.
You write one declaration: who you are, what the file is, and how it was made. That declaration and the fingerprint go onto an append-only chain as a single entry. Every night the head of that chain is timestamped by an outside RFC 3161 timestamp authority we do not control.
That last part matters most. After the stamp, nobody can slip an earlier entry in, APIR included. Change one byte of a sealed file and the fingerprint no longer matches. Change the declaration and the chain no longer adds up.
It is free for a person.
What it proves, and what it does not
A seal proves that a named person declared these words over these exact bytes, no later than the date on the stamp.
It does not prove the declaration is true. It does not prove how the work was made. The sentence on every seal is fixed and we will not soften it: APIR sealed the declaration and the files. APIR did not determine how the work was made.
That is the whole claim. A narrow claim you can check beats a broad one you have to trust.
Check it with us switched off
Every seal has a portable proof: the declaration, the chain entries, the Merkle path to the stamped root, and the authority's timestamp token. Download it and open apir.ai/proof/verify-seal, a single page whose own security policy forbids it from making any network request. Drop the proof and the file into it. It recomputes everything in your browser.
The timestamp token checks with openssl against the authority's own certificate. Our specimen seal passes that check today. If APIR vanished tomorrow, a proof you had already downloaded would still check with openssl.
The other side: check anything
The seal is half of it. The other half is for everyone holding a file they did not make.
Drop any file at apir.ai/seal/check. It is fingerprinted in your browser, nothing uploaded, and APIR answers one question: did anyone seal a declaration over these exact bytes? For images and video it also measures a pixel fingerprint, so a re-encoded or resized copy of a sealed picture can come back as a near match, with the distance stated.
A near match is a measurement, not a verdict. APIR never says whether a picture is real. It says what the record holds.
Honest about the size of it
The record is new. Today most checks will come back with no seal found, because almost nothing has been sealed yet. That is what a record looks like at the start, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Seal one file that matters to you. Then check it. If it takes more than a minute, tell me.
We don't promise results. We prove whatever happens.