LH045 checkpoint, 8 November 2026: the first capture

In short. We set out to keep three kinds of public record that overwrite themselves: daily compute prices, Epoch AI's estimates of AI data centres, and the IETF's drafts on agents and bots before and after its meeting from 14 November. The price sources all forbid keeping their figures, so nothing was kept from them. Epoch's records and a first census of 604 drafts were kept today, with the history Epoch still serves back to March 2026; the next census is on 12 or 13 November and the next Epoch read on 15 November. This page says what was kept, not what it shows; that is for a later study.

Written 8 November 2026 by a subagent of the driving session (Claude Code, Claude Opus 5.5), under the brief (protocol 0.1, amendment 0.2). Unreviewed.

What was kept

Capture	Started (UTC)	Requests	Kept
Epoch read 0, data/epoch/raw-2026-11-08T1913Z/	19:13:54	8, all HTTP 200	robots.txt; hub, update log and documentation pages; the "All datasets" ZIP (7 files: the data-centre, timeline, chip-quantity, chiller, cooling-tower and chip-type CSVs and a README, all stamped 8 November 18:12 inside the archive); the three CSVs fetched separately (96 data-centre rows, 573 timeline rows, 258 chip-quantity rows); and `updates.csv` derived from the log page's embedded data.
IETF census 0a, rule 0.1, data/ietf/raw-2026-11-08T1914Z/	19:14:18	37, all HTTP 200	562 drafts. Superseded as the baseline by census 0 (amendment 0.2) and kept as disclosed.
IETF census 0, rule 0.2, data/ietf/raw-2026-11-08T1915Z/	19:15:49	42, all HTTP 200	robots.txt; IETF 127's meeting record and plain-text agenda; the five group records and the records of every other group a census draft names; every page of each document query (no page left a further page); the draft state table; author records for all census drafts, emails replaced; two Datatracker-wide baseline counts. Derived: `census.csv` (604 drafts: 593 by name only, 10 by group and name, 1 by group only) and `authors.csv` (1,238 author lines on 603 drafts, 1,184 with an affiliation filled in).

Pre-brief reads, including the two Epoch pages read at 19:00 UTC and the Datatracker probes, are in data/before-the-brief/ with their read log.

History still available, and kept

Epoch's update log as served today carries 115 dated entries in its page data, 14 March to 5 November 2026 (727 change lines in updates.csv), although the page shows only those from 8 October until "See more" is pressed. All 115 are kept. Whether the earliest date moves later on later weeks is question E1.
Epoch's timelines CSV is itself a dated history: 573 rows for 96 sites, with dates from 18 December 2018 to 1 January 2030 (later dates are Epoch's projections). The chip-quantity CSV's dates run from 1 January 2021 to 1 January 2029.
Earlier versions of the CSVs are not offered by Epoch, and the Wayback Machine was not used (unreachable from this container on 7 November, by scout 7). Anything Epoch revised before today is lost to this archive except as the log describes it.
IETF: Datatracker keeps every draft's past revisions, so the census needs no back history; what it cannot recover later is each draft's state, group and metadata as they stood on a given day, which is what the censuses keep.

What was not kept, and why

Compute prices (lead L-0011): none. Silicon Data's, DRAMeXchange's and Shanghai Metals Market's terms forbid keeping or reproducing their figures, and so do the two substitutes checked (Vast.ai's marketplace; Microsoft's API terms for the Azure Retail Prices API). The brief quotes each clause. Their pages were read once to establish this and their bodies are not in the repository. Nothing was signed into, and no paid history was sought.
IETF author emails were replaced by a placeholder before any author record was written, on purpose.

Checks made

Every request in the three captures answered 200; robots.txt allowed every URL used; no list page had a further page left unread; the ZIP's file list and the CSV headers were read to check the files are what their names say. No value in the captures was analysed. Census 0's two baseline counts were kept and not looked at.

What happens next

IETF census 1 on 12 or 13 November, the last before the meeting; census 2 between 23 and 27 November.
Epoch weekly reads from 15 November to 3 January 2027.
Checkpoint 2 between 27 November and 1 December; the closing checkpoint between 4 and 9 January 2027, which hands the archive and the named questions (E1 to E4, I1 to I4 in the brief) to a later study.