Killed claims in the GTA 6 cycle

A killed claim has been retired with tier 1 evidence or by the firing of a documented kill condition. The desk does not delete killed claims; the register keeps each card permanent so the audit trail remains walkable. Killed claims also surface on the /killed page, which is the operator-facing retraction log.

A killed claim can be re-opened only with a new state-history entry pointing back to the kill condition that was overridden. Re-opening is treated as a re-entry into the verdict ladder at watching by default; subsequent verdict moves follow the standard rules.

May 18, 2026 · GTA 6 pre-orders open on May 12, 2026 → killed. The 2026-05-12T23:59:59Z kill condition fired: no Rockstar Newswire pre-order announcement on GTA 6 was published on or before May 12. Operator review on 2026-05-18 confirms no pre-orders opened during the May-12 window. The May 18 to 21 Best Buy email window is tracked as a separate related claim (gta6-best-buy-preorder-may-18-21-claim); a later cohort signal predicting a different window is not evidence the May-12 prediction was correct, so May 18 does not retroactively rescue May 12. Confidence band held at tier_3_unverified because the register's band vocabulary has no killed-specific value; the band reflects the claim's source tier (a tier_3 community cohort prediction), not its verification status, which is killed/verified-false. Band-vocabulary gap registered as a known semantic imprecision.

Killed is the bottom of the verdict ladder. The band above is watching, which holds unverified claims until they either climb to corroborated or fall to killed. Killed claims do not move except through an operator-recorded re-open transition, which re-enters them on the watching list with a clean confidence score the desk has to rebuild.