An entry in the Airframe registry is a product a finance team would recognize: a named vendor, a deployed surface, a category that maps to enterprise work. The registry tracks 17,000+ AI tools paired with 114,000+ deployment case studies, because that is the set a CIO has to act on.
A registry is only useful if the unit is defined. An Airframe entry is a product a finance team would recognize: a named vendor, a deployed surface in production, a category that maps to enterprise work. Every published row carries provenance, case studies, peer migration volume, and pricing lineage, because all of that was already gathered before the row was published. The registry is a working file, not a list.
Before any product is published into the registry, it has to be a thing a CIO could actually buy, deploy, and hold on a contract. An entry is a named product, sold or delivered by a legal entity, with deployment evidence at an organization we can name on a case-study record, inside a category that maps to real enterprise work. Every published product clears all four. The ones that don't are held in a staging file until they do.
That is why the depth per entry compounds. A tool in Airframe comes with category lineage, vendor provenance, case studies, peer migration volume, and pricing movement against the category average, because all of that was already gathered before the entry was published. The registry is a working file, not a list.
The unit is narrow on purpose. A plugin, wrapper, or fork that does not change the working surface is catalogued under the parent product. A package on a code-hosting platform is not an entry on its own. A browser extension that mentions AI is not an entry on its own. The bar is what a finance team would recognize on a budget line.
Most candidates fail at least one of these signals on first pass, and most fail on the first two. The signals are not technical, they are editorial, and the discipline matters because a CIO reading the registry is building a case she will have to defend to her CFO and sometimes her board.
A registry is only as good as what each row is built from. The Airframe registry is constructed from primary, public material that an outside reader can verify on their own. Public filings, fund disclosures, vendor announcements, and confirmed press are the four classes of source that put a row into the working file in the first place.
Vendor-supplied claims do not enter the registry on their own. A press release, a website tagline, or a private conversation with a sales team can prompt a row to be opened, but the row is not published until a corroborating public source is on file. Every published row carries a date stamp and the source list it was built from, visible inside the workspace alongside the entry itself.
That is the discipline behind every published row. The bar to enter the registry is the source list.
The registry is a working file. Every night, it reconciles against the defined source list, picking up new filings, new funding events, new vendor announcements, and any press that has cleared the editorial standard. Routine changes update in place; material changes are flagged and queued for human review before they publish.
What counts as material is narrow on purpose. Acquisition, IPO, ownership change, a meaningful valuation move, or any reclassification across the lineage is held until a researcher reviews it. That is what keeps the working file from drifting under the weight of its own automation.
At the close of every quarter, the registry runs a full audit pass. The audit checks the prior quarter's published changes against current public sources, reconciles any divergence, and is the moment when category lineage and vendor provenance get re-walked end to end.
The registry is held to a single posture, and the posture is stricter than the industry standard. Airframe accepts no vendor sponsorship, no syndicated research budget, no analyst retainer, and no payment in any form from the companies on the registry. The workspace is paid for by the customers who use it, and only by them.
That is the line that lets the registry sort, score, and rank without hedging. The reason competitor migration patterns can be published, the reason renewal exposure can be flagged, and the reason a row can carry an honest mark on the way out is that nobody on the registry is paying to soften it. When a researcher has even a procedural conflict with an entry, the conflict is disclosed at the row.
It is the one piece of methodology that does not need a chart. The number is zero, and the number stays zero.
No vendor money. The number is zero, and it stays zero.
A brief is the fastest way to see what 17,000 entries and 114,000 case studies actually do for a real decision. Stack Audit, Vendor Deep Dive, or Renewal Briefing. Built from the registry, by humans, and free to request.