AI prospecting that refuses to hallucinate.

The 3×3 is a classic sales-research framework: three specific, recent facts about a prospect, gathered before any outreach. The idea has been in elite enterprise sales playbooks for decades: don't reach out cold without three real reasons to be reaching out to this person, right now. Prospect Engine modernizes it with AI structuring and adds one strict rule the original framework didn't have: every one of the three facts must cite where it came from. Pasted a LinkedIn post? That post is a source. Pasted an article? Same. The AI cannot produce a fact without one.

"Hallucination" is the technical term for when an AI confidently states something that isn't true: invented quotes, fabricated events, made-up statistics. Most AI outreach tools hallucinate constantly because they're optimized to sound personalized, not to be accurate. They'll cheerfully tell you "Sarah recently posted about lead-gen challenges" when she did no such thing.

Prospect Engine is built around a different principle: the AI can only state what your pasted source material proves. If you paste her real post, the tool can reference it. If you paste nothing, the tool tells you it has nothing to say, instead of inventing something. Three layers enforce this: a strict system prompt forbids fabrication, a code-level validation strips claims that lack a source quote, and the UI tags every fact as either Verified (traceable to your paste) or Inferred (general industry pattern). Outreach openers can only reference Verified facts. Empty output is preferred over wrong output.

You bring your own Anthropic API key. Claude charges around 2-4¢ per research run on your account. AI-Disruptors doesn't take a cut: the tool runs on your key, hits the API directly (or via your own Cloudflare Worker), and writes nothing to any server. The "catch" is that I'm hoping you'll like the work enough to consider Strategy Studio when you're ready. That's it.

Most AI prospecting tools optimize for impressive-sounding output. Ask one to research a prospect with no source material and it will confidently tell you about "their recent post", fabricated. Prospect Engine has a code-level validation layer that strips unsourced claims before you ever see them. The architecture refuses to lie, even when the AI is willing to.

You. Manually. On purpose. Open a prospect's LinkedIn, copy their About section and recent posts, paste in. Read a relevant news article, paste the quotes that matter. This sounds like more work than it is, 90 seconds per prospect, and it produces dramatically better outreach than scraped data, because you've already filtered for relevance. (Also: scraping LinkedIn is against their TOS and unreliable. This way is honest and works.)

Anthropic does require a paid API account, but it's pay-as-you-go and minimal. You'll need to sign up at console.anthropic.com, add a credit card, and put $5 of credits on the account, that's about 200 prospect research runs. There's no monthly fee. Settings inside Prospect Engine walks you through getting the key.

David S. Josephson: founder of AI-Disruptors, an elite AI strategy and consulting practice. Prospect Engine was originally a personal tool for the practice, opened publicly because the anti-hallucination architecture turned out to be useful for anyone doing outreach. Strategy Studio is the larger, paid sibling, for full consulting practices.

Yes, indefinitely. No account, no upgrade tier, no premium features locked behind a paywall. The honest economics: you pay for your own Claude usage, AI-Disruptors pays nothing to host (it's a static HTML file). The tool exists to demonstrate how I think: if it earns me a Strategy Studio conversation eventually, that's enough.