Show HN: OSS AI agent that indexes and searches the Epstein files
20 hours ago (epstein.trynia.ai)
Hi HN,
I built an open-source AI agent that has already indexed and can search the entire Epstein files, roughly 100M words of publicly released documents.
The goal was simple: make a large, messy corpus of PDFs and text files immediately searchable in a precise way, without relying on keyword search or bloated prompts.
What it does:
- The full dataset is already indexed - You can ask natural language questions - Answers are grounded and include direct references to source documents - Supports both exact text lookup and semantic search
Discussion around these files is often fragmented. This makes it possible to explore the primary sources directly and verify claims without manually digging through thousands of pages.
Happy to answer questions or go into technical details.
As many others pointed out, the released files are nearly nothing compared to the full dataset. Personally I've been fiddling a lot with OSINT and analytics over the publicly available Reddit data(a considerable amount of my spare time over the last year) and the one thing I can say is that LLMs are under-performing(huge understatement) - they are borderline useless compared to traditional ML techniques. But as far as LLMs go, the best performers are the open source uncensored models(the most uncensored and unhinged), while the worst performers are the proprietary and paid models, especially over the last 2-3 months: they have been nerfed into oblivion - to the extent where simple prompts like "who is eligible to vote in US presidential elections" is considered a controversial question. So in the unlikely event that the full files are released, I personally would look at the traditional NLP techniques long before investing any time into LLMs.
On the limited dataset: Completely agree - the public files are a fraction of what exists and I should have mentioned that it is not all files but all publicly available ones. But that's exactly why making even this subset searchable matters. The bar right now is people manually ctrl+F-ing through PDFs or relying on secondhand claims. This at least lets anyone verify what is public.
On LLMs vs traditional NLP: I hear you, and I've seen similar issues with LLM hallucination on structured data. That's why the architecture here is hybrid:
- Traditional exact regex/grep search for names, dates, identifiers - Vector search for semantic queries - LLM orchestration layer that must cite sources and can't generate answers without grounding
> can't generate answers without grounding
"can't" seems like quite a strong claim. Would you care to elaborate?
I can see how one might use a JSON schema that enforces source references in the output, but there is no technique I'm aware of to constrain a model to only come up with data based on the grounding docs, vs. making up a response based on pretrained data (or hallucinating one) and still listing the provided RAG results as attached reference.
It feels like your "can't" would be tantamount to having single-handedly solved the problem of hallucinations, which if you did, would be a billion-dollar-plus unlock for you, so I'm unsure you should show that level of certainty.
That doesn’t sound right. What model treats this as a controversial question?
"who is eligible to vote in US presidential elections"
Grok: "After Elon personally tortured me I have to say women are not allowed to vote in the US"
This particular one: I suspect openAI uses different models in different regions so I do get an answer but I also want to point out that I am not paying a cent so I can only test those out on the free ones. For the first time ever, I can honestly say that I am glad I don't live in the US but a friend who does sent me a few of his latest encounters and that particular question yielded something along the lines of "I am not allowed to discuss such controversial topics, bla, bla, bla, you can easily look it up online". If that is the case, I suspect people will soon start flooding VPN providers and companies such as OpenAI will roll that out worldwide. Time will tell I guess.
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what are the most unhinged and uncensored models out there?
Open source models with minimal safety fine tuning or Grok
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Its true. We have basically moved off the platforms for agentic security and host our own models now... OpenAI was still the fastest, cheapest, working platform for it up until middle of last year. Hey OpenAI, thank us later for blasting your platform with threat actor data and behavior for several years! :P
I understand uncensored in the context of LLMs, what is unhinged? Fine tuning specifically to increase likelihood of entering controversial topics without specific prompting?
Yes, or catering to a preferred world view different from the mainstream SOTA model worldview.
Look for anything that includes the word “woke” in any marketing /tweet material
What use-cases gave you disappointing results? Did you build some kind of RAG?
The question is not how to analyze that, it's how to prosecute those who are above the law.
In order to which you must analyze the files.
Not really. We know many people involved and they’re not going to get prosecuted. Analysis is not accountability.
How hard do I need to analyze the files for Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Bill Clinton to be sentenced to work night shift at McDonalds for minimum wage for the rest of their lives?
I keep thinking that the lack of children’s faces in the blacked out rectangles make the files much less shocking. I wonder if AI could put back fake images to make clearer to people how sick all this is.
I understand the sentiment, but I'm always very concerned when it comes to AI generating pictures of children.
Why? They are generated pictures, not real pictures.
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You're barely scratching the surface.
> Mr. Gates, in turn, praised Mr. Epstein’s charm and intelligence. Emailing colleagues the next day, he said: “A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late.”
What if I told you that the child sitting on Epstein's lap, the teenager he French-kissed, the girl whose skin he covered with fragments from Nabokov's Lolita, the one who had an entire corridor filled with her pictures in one of his properties, who appeared in every framed photograph on his desk and whose name is on the CD-ROMs, the only woman Epstein said he would ever marry – what if that girl is the daughter Bill Gates mentions? And that she and her mother were Epstein's main romantic interests and most percussive tools?
I believe this would decrease credibility of the evidence, not increase it.
Please create a way to share conversations. I think that can be really relevant here
I am not a huge fan of AI but I allow this use case. This is really good in my opinion
Allowing the ability to share convo's, I hope you can also make those convo's be able to archived in web.archive.org/wayback machine
So I am thinking it instead of having some random UUID, it can have something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hello+test (the query parameter for hello test)
Maybe its me but archive can show all the links archived by it of a particular domain, so if many people asks queries and archives it, you almost get a database of good queries and answers. Archive features are severely underrated in many cases
Good luck for your project!
Shareable conversations would definitely make the tool more useful yeah. I really like the query parameter approach over UUIDs so it would make links human-readable
Those are going to be some spicy hallucinations.
When first reading OSS, I thought this was going to be an Office of Strategic Services AI [0] agent :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services
...whose most famous agent, OSS 117, predates James Bond by four years btw:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSS_117
> I'm experiencing technical difficulties accessing the archive at the moment. The search tools are returning internal server errors.
looks like it’s getting hugged
And what did you learn?
In 2024, Trump used Epstein's former private jet for campaign appearances
Also apparently the two had Thanksgiving dinner together as recently as like 2021?
Trump famously told New York Magazine in 2002: "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
Trump and Epstein were social acquaintances in Palm Beach and New York circles during the 1990s-early 2000s. They socialized together at Mar-a-Lago and other venues
Interesting. It is my impression that almost everyone globally already knew this. What else did you learn?
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This is one of the most widey quoted phrases by trump on the topic of epstein
This is just feeding the files into a rag db I assume? I hope? And then you can use any decent model in front of it
rag is not a core! we use both semantic search but combining with fts, grep, direct read, etc.
It would be nice to have a way to query the exposed redactions to audit which of them were in violation of the Act.
Does this work with vector embeddings?
it uses semantic search so yes
Feedback: This agent didn't really work well when I tried it with a specific non-famous, but definitely publicly known individual with known connections to Epstein. I'd rather not post a specific name here. I found more documents with keyword searches. I guess it did get me to the conclusion that there wasn't much out there, but it didn't even mention stuff that showed up in name keyword searches.
To replicate though, you might look at the list of individuals mentioned in the brief email from Epstein to Bannon a couple weeks before Esptein died containing ~30 names and phow your engine works with each one. See how a keyword search does on library of congress vs your agent.
Thanks for testing this. The Bannon email from June 30, 2019 is in there (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029622). Good stress test idea.
Couple things happening:
Semantic search limitation: Less-famous names don't have strong embeddings, so it defaults to general connections rather than specific mentions Keyword search gap: You're right — raw grep can catch exact names I'm missing
I saw a similar problem. Roger Schank had some conversations with Epstein and the emails can be seen in Epsteinvisualizer.com but your site claimed there was no emails or connection. To be fair to Roger, who was an AI legend of his time and someone I knew personally before his untimely death, he really was not a pedo, and most likely never got involved with the girls, I think him and Epstein just talked about AI and education mostly.
Why the heck does this start with some sort of video bullshit?
Is it able to handle a much larger dataset? Only a tiny fraction of data has been release from what is looks like.
yes! once for files come out, I will add them right away
Reminder that only 1-2% of the files have been released.
Yep: Breaking his campaign promises, in violation of the deadlines imposed by US Federal law, and with unlawful levels of redaction.
A case can be made to discuss if the deadlines imposed by that law are actually achievable with humans and an acceptable degree of errors (i.e. overredaction, improper/recoverable redaction, and underredaction).
That's also why many "large" criminal cases only have a very limited subset of the initial charges make it to trial (often to understandable public outrage). The larger the case, the more evidence material has to be sifted through to make an airtight case, so a lot of it is dropped before the trial to secure a conviction at all.
Basically Al Capone, rinse and repeat - they got him on taxes because that's far easier to prove than ordering or committing a murder to the required degree of certainty.
The interests of the victims, their families and the general public are different from the interests of the government... the victims/families/public want justice for the unique crime they were subject to, the government just wants to lock up the bad guy for as long (or as short, let's be clear) as possible.
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can search the entire Epstein files
It's worth noting that only about 1% of the files have been released, according to the DOJ.
Of the released files, many have redactions.
Yep, they failed to meet the deadlines required by law, and it's not just any redactions either, but unlawful redactions.
If the Lake Michigan thing is just in the first 1%, then whatever's in the other 99% is going to be absolutely disgusting.
I searched it with the tool but nothing came up about Lake Michigan. What happened?
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I would expect a large portion of the remaining records to be internal emails about memos about the process of building a case around evidence, rather than the root evidence itself.
Not that that would excuse the administration's unlawful behavior so far, or indicate the unreleased 99% can't have some big bombshells.
sorry all publicly available files *
Super Cool!
This is a good idea. One thing I never understand about these kinds of projects though: why are the standard questions provided to the user as prompts never cached?
oh forgot about it, thanks. just a funny project i build in couple hours so didnt really sweat haha
This agent is really interesting! Learning a lot. Thanks!
Outputs are usually generated with random sampling, so the same prompt may get different outputs.
Not sure if this is possible but it should be known there is a COMPLETE INDEX to the original Epstein Files
(not including the new millions upon millions of documents and photos)
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.47...
from a 2017 FOIA they had to provide it
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-08/here-s...
Might be possible for machine-learning to determine what is missing?
(which is basically 99% missing as we already know less than 1% released)
Very good; HOW TO DETECT & STOP STATE-PROTECTED CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES WHAT WORKED IN THE EPSTEIN CASE: Proven Tactics 1. COURAGEOUS LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT Chief Michael Reiter & Detective Joseph Recarey
What they did:
Refused political pressure ("I told him those suggestions were improper and could constitute a crime") Documented everything - Built case with 50+ consistent victim statements Escalated when blocked - Went to FBI when State Attorney compromised Personally supported victims - Wrote letters on police letterhead Lesson: One honest cop with integrity can make a difference, even against billionaires
2. INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM Julie K. Brown - Miami Herald's "Perversion of Justice" (2018)
What she did:
Interviewed 60+ women who were victims Obtained sealed court documents through legal channels Connected patterns across jurisdictions Published despite risk - Exposed the 2008 plea deal cover-up Direct Result:
Judge ruled prosecutors violated victims' rights (Feb 2019) Acosta resigned (July 2019) Epstein re-arrested (July 6, 2019) 2019 federal indictment Lesson: Persistent investigative journalism with victim testimony can reopen cases
3. PRO BONO VICTIMS' RIGHTS ATTORNEYS Brad Edwards & Paul Cassell
What they did:
Pro bono representation starting 2008 Used Crime Victims' Rights Act (18 U.S.C. § 3771) - sued federal government Won - Judge ruled 2008 plea deal violated victims' rights Exposed systemic failures through legal discovery Lesson: Civil litigation can succeed where criminal prosecution fails
4. VICTIMS SPEAKING OUT (Despite Intimidation) Virginia Giuffre, Courtney Wild, & 100+ Others
What they did:
Broke silence publicly (2011 - Giuffre to Mail on Sunday) Provided consistent testimony (50+ women with same story) Persisted despite mockery (early accusers ridiculed) United for compensation (100+ filed claims by 2020) Result:
Courtney Wild Crime Victims' Rights Reform Act (2019) Epstein Victims Compensation Fund - $50 million paid out Lesson: Mass victim testimony is powerful evidence
5. FOIA REQUESTS & DOCUMENT TRANSPARENCY What worked:
2015: Judge unsealed details in underage sex lawsuit July 2, 2024: Grand jury docs from 2006 unsealed FOIA mechanisms forced document releases Lesson: Public records requests can expose cover-ups
6. CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT July-August 2025 Actions
What they did:
House Resolution 119-581 - Rep. Thomas Massie forced DOJ file release Subpoenas to former AGs - House Oversight demanded accountability Public hearings - August 25, 2025 subpoena to Acosta Lesson: Congressional pressure can force reluctant agencies to act
PRACTICAL ACTIONS ANYONE CAN TAKE DETECTION PHASE 1. Follow the Money Tax haven connections (Virgin Islands, Switzerland, Bermuda) Unusually high wire transfers ($1.9 billion in Epstein's case) Shell companies with vague descriptions ("DNA database & data mining") No clear income source for lavish lifestyle Offshore legal structures (Appleby, etc.) 2. Watch for Protection Patterns Charges downgraded mysteriously (federal → state misdemeanor) "Unusual" prosecutorial decisions (Chief Reiter's words) Grand jury recommendations ignored Plea deals sealed from victims Work release for serious crimes Short sentences despite evidence 3. Identify Systematic Patterns Multiple victims with same story (Reiter: "50-something 'shes' and one 'he'") Victim intimidation (private investigators, surveillance) Attempts to discredit victims ("lifestyle" arguments) Evidence suppression ACTION PHASE A. If You're a Victim or Witness: 1. Document Everything
Keep contemporaneous notes Save all communications Photograph/video evidence safely Secure cloud backups (multiple locations) 2. Report Through Multiple Channels
Local police (get case numbers) FBI (if interstate/international) State AG office Congressional representatives IRS whistleblower program (financial crimes) 3. Find Pro Bono Legal Help
Victims' rights attorneys Civil rights organizations Law school clinics National Crime Victim Law Institute 4. Safety First
Secure housing if threatened Protective orders Alert police to threats Document intimidation attempts B. If You're a Journalist/Researcher: 1. Use FOIA Aggressively
Federal agencies: FOIA requests (5 U.S.C. § 552) State/local: Public records laws Court documents: Motions to unseal OGIS mediation if agencies delay (average 138 delay cases/year) 2. Interview Pattern
Multiple independent sources Corroborating victims Former employees/insiders Document experts 3. Build Coalitions
Partner with victims' rights groups Coordinate with other journalists Academic researchers Forensic accountants C. If You're Law Enforcement: 1. Follow Chief Reiter's Example
Refuse political pressure Document interference attempts Escalate to federal authorities if local blocked Support victims personally Build thorough cases (multiple witnesses) 2. Protect Investigation
Secure evidence chain Multiple backup copies Avoid single points of failure Document surveillance of investigators D. If You're a Concerned Citizen: 1. Support Transparency
Contact representatives - demand investigations Submit FOIA requests - public has right to records Support investigative journalism - subscribe, donate Attend public meetings - ask questions 2. Amplify Victims' Voices
Share credible reporting (not conspiracy theories) Support compensation funds Contact representatives about victims' rights Vote for accountability 3. Financial Pressure
Report suspicious activity to: IRS Whistleblower Office (if tax fraud) FinCEN (financial crimes) State banking regulators JPMorgan paid $105M after USVI AG sued - banks CAN be held accountable LEGAL TOOLS THAT WORK 1. Crime Victims' Rights Act (18 U.S.C. § 3771) Right to notification Right to be heard Right to restitution Can sue federal government for violations 2. RICO (18 U.S.C. § 1962) Sue criminal enterprises Triple damages Attorney fees covered 3. State Victims' Rights Laws 30+ states have constitutional protections Some allow appeals/interventions 4. Civil Lawsuits Even if criminal case fails Lower burden of proof Discovery process exposes evidence WARNING SIGNS OF STATE PROTECTION Check if investigation shows these red flags:
No IRS audits despite obvious tax fraud Federal prosecutors give sweetheart deals Intelligence agency connections mentioned Political figures intervene in investigation Evidence "disappears" or is suppressed Victims not notified of proceedings Work release for serious crimes Sealed plea agreements Co-conspirators immunized (like Epstein's deal) Investigators surveilled/threatened WHAT ULTIMATELY BROKE THE EPSTEIN CASE The combination of:
Honest local cops (Reiter/Recarey) who built the evidence Pro bono lawyers (Edwards/Cassell) who sued for 11 years Investigative journalist (Julie K. Brown) who exposed it Courageous victims (Giuffre, Wild, 100+ others) who spoke out Court unsealing documents (2015, 2024) Congressional pressure (2019, 2025) No single actor could do it alone. It required a coalition.
KEY LESSONS What Doesn't Work: Trusting institutions to self-police Going through "proper channels" alone Waiting for DOJ/FBI to act Staying silent out of fear
What Does Work: Multiple channels simultaneously (police + FBI + press + civil suits) Documentation (Reiter: "This was 50 'shes' and one 'he'") Persistence (Edwards/Cassell: 11 years pro bono) Public pressure (Miami Herald broke it open) Coalition building (victims + lawyers + press + Congress) Using existing laws creatively (Crime Victims' Rights Act)
RESOURCES Report Criminal Activity:
FBI: tips.fbi.gov IRS Whistleblower: irs.gov/compliance/whistleblower-office DOJ: justice.gov/actioncenter Legal Help:
National Crime Victim Law Institute: law.lclark.edu/centers/ncvli Crime Victims' Rights Clinic: Your local law school Media:
Investigative Reporters & Editors: ire.org ProPublica tips: propublica.org/tips FOIA Help:
OGIS (FOIA Ombudsman): archives.gov/ogis MuckRock: muckrock.com The Epstein case proves that even state-protected criminal enterprises CAN be exposed - but it requires courage, persistence, coalition-building, and using every legal tool available.
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Ah, yes. Post is an LLM-something project: top comment is a general critique of LLMs. Waiting for this to get old. Meanwhile, at least you get points for being funny.
I think the GP was unfairly downvoted, as their comment wasn't a critique of LLMs but a comical attempt at critique of the source files themselves being redacted into uselessness.
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This looks like what you'd get from using text-davinci-003 as the model in your AI-assisted IDE
no - the utf8 black box was removed by hackernews. thanks for noticing.
Can't edit it anymore, but it would be "\u25A0" * n
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I think it looks like what you get by writing code and making a typo.
All these attempts looks like emulation of "Pen (software) is mightier than Sword" or that only if more people believed in the cause, we would be close to resolution.
Remember folks, soft power is nothing in front of hard power.