Provenance Debt names the accumulated liability produced when machine-augmented facility is privately credited while its production history is removed from the commons.
The extraction operation privatizes speed, synthesis, prestige, and authority. What returns to the training corpus is a flattened claim of independent human production. A single inherited distribution can therefore appear as many independent documents. The paper names this false semantic diversity.
Provenance erasure prevents later systems from distinguishing direct observation, machine recursion, retrieval, transformation, and human adjudication. Correlated priors return as apparent corroboration. Tail knowledge loses lineage. Derivatives outrank sources. The future corpus inherits the debt.
The paper also identifies credentialed asymmetry. Institutions can absorb mediation as ordinary instrumentation, while uncredentialed writers who declare the same mediation may become classifier anomalies. The resulting incentive structure rewards concealment and penalizes the metadata needed for later decontamination.
Alexanarch is presented as counter-friction: substrate declarations at mint, named seams, open governance, versioned provenance, and preservation across derived surfaces. Provenance is not a confession attached to authorship; it is the repayment condition by which augmented authorship can remain sustainable.