About the American Factbook

Independence

American Factbook LLC is a private publisher. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, any other federal agency, or any state government. Where this site reproduces a government dataset it says which agency published it and links to the agency’s own page for that data.

Who publishes it

Kian O'Connor, Founder and Editor. Kian O'Connor is the founder and editor of the American Factbook. He has spent several years building public-interest data sites that turn government datasets into readable, searchable reference pages, and he is responsible for the Factbook’s methodology, sourcing, and corrections. He is based in California.

A brief carries a byline. Every brief the editor has read before it was published is signed By Kian O'Connor; an automated analysis no person has read is signed American Factbook Research. No data page carries a byline; the editor is named in every footer, as the person who answers for the site. Every other page names the agencies its data comes from, in the sources at its foot, because they are the record and this site is a copy of it.

How it is built

The American Factbook is built and maintained by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working in Claude Code. It writes the pipelines that fetch each dataset, the queries, the pages and the checks, under a written rule set the editor keeps. The rules a reader relies on, and what enforces each, are on How this site is built.

How the figures are checked

Before a page with a fixed set of figures ships, every query behind it is run again and every number in its text is compared with what the query returned; a difference stops it. After every deploy, pages built from the database on request are sampled and each figure on them is checked against a direct query. Where a publisher prints its own total for something this site computes, the two are compared and a difference beyond a stated tolerance fails the build rather than being printed.

Funding and license

American Factbook LLC is a private publisher, funded by neither any government (above) nor advertising: the site carries none. The site’s own text, charts and derived tables are licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse them with credit to the American Factbook. Each source dataset keeps its publisher’s terms, listed with the dataset on /data.

How to read a page here

Every statistic on this site is the output of a query that is checked into the repository next to the text that uses it. No figure is written from memory or estimated. Each page shows the date it was last updated and links to the dataset it was built from. Where a dataset cannot answer a question, the page says so instead of answering it anyway.

Corrections

Errors are corrected in place and logged, with a date, at /corrections. Entries are never removed. To report one, write to kian@americanfactbook.org.

Methodology

How sources are selected, snapshotted, and checked is documented at /methodology.