Who we are
Activists, researchers, engineers, survivors.
Between us we count family members, close friends, and colleagues who have been wrongfully detained, tortured, or killed by the Chinese Communist regime for their beliefs. Some of us have been imprisoned ourselves. Some have been silenced. All of us have spent years — in some cases decades — documenting what happens behind the walls of that country's prisons and camps, and building networks of survivors and witnesses to keep those records intact.
What we saw
Ordinary channels ran out.
For most of our lives we tried to raise the alarm through the ordinary channels. Testimony before parliaments. Reports for human-rights bodies. Documentaries. Diplomatic lobbying. Some of it landed. Most of it didn't. The regime kept expanding, kept persecuting, and — critically — kept exporting.
At some point the pattern became impossible to ignore. Every dollar a Western shopper spends on a product manufactured under a system of forced labour, censorship, or state coercion is a dollar that funds the machinery we have spent our lives fighting. The shopper isn't complicit — they can't be, they don't know. The product page tells them nothing. The label is designed to hide, not reveal. The retailer profits from the ambiguity. And the money flows, quiet and constant, into the coffers of a state that treats its own people as raw material.
Meanwhile the international response has been thin. Trade agreements ignore the coercive foundations of what they trade. Human-rights language is stripped out at the drafting stage. Governments that could act, don't. Governments that would act, can't — because their economies are too entangled. The political will to intervene at any scale sufficient to matter has been absent for a generation, and shows no sign of arriving.
Why transparency
Information is the one lever that scales.
We considered many strategies. Lawsuits. Boycotts. Treaties. Corporate pressure campaigns. Some of them we still work on. But the one thing that scales — the one thing that doesn't require the permission of any government or the goodwill of any retailer — is information itself.
Every purchase is a vote. Every dollar signals what the shopper is willing to support. The market, at scale, is the largest continuous referendum in human history. But a vote cast in ignorance is not a vote at all. It is manipulation, dressed up as choice.
Real Product Origin exists to give shoppers back the vote. Where is this product actually made. Who actually manufactured it. Where does the money actually go. Not what the label wants you to think. What is really true.
What we're building
A transparency layer for the marketplaces you already shop.
Available as a browser extension today — starting on Amazon, Target, Walmart, and 30 other major retailers. A mobile app is on the way. Sourced from public records, cross-checked against structured databases, and — where evidence is thin — presented with confidence bands that admit what we don't know. No greenwashing. No manufactured trust. Just the fact of a product's provenance, put in front of you at the moment you decide whether to click Buy.
This is not the whole solution. It is one practical step in a much longer effort. If enough people, at scale, start knowing what they're buying, the market will begin to sort itself.
That is what we are here to do.
Why now
Frontier AI made this possible.
Real Product Origin exists because a frontier AI model can now read a product page and reason over structured evidence in a way no small team could hand-maintain across millions of SKUs. We use Claude, Anthropic's frontier model. Claude reads every product listing, weighs it against trademark filings, customs records, brand databases, and corporate registries, and produces the four country-and-confidence answers you see on the badge. Two guardrails keep the AI honest: every claim must cite a real source (no citation, no score), and Claude is required to write down what it already knows about a brand before reading the paperwork — so a Chinese seller filing a Delaware LLC doesn't fool a naive trademark lookup into reporting "United States." Human corrections override AI scores. Confidence is an admission, not marketing.
Where the money goes
Who pays for this, and what that buys them.
A service that tells you who is behind a product invites an obvious question: who is behind the service? Here is the whole answer.
Subscriptions are our only revenue. Free, Basic, Unlimited and Supporter — that is the entire list. Real Product Origin LLC is a for-profit company, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise.
What we do not take. No advertising. No affiliate links or commissions — we earn nothing whether or not you buy the product you are looking at, which is the only arrangement under which a “money goes to China: 91%” score can be trusted. No payment from any retailer or brand for coverage, placement, or a better result. And we do not sell your data; the privacy policy sets out exactly what we keep and for how long.
Supporter buys nothing extra. It costs more than Unlimited and includes exactly the same product — no priority, no influence over scores or over which retailers we build next, no acknowledgment attached to any result. It exists so that people who want to fund this work can, without us inventing perks that would quietly become a way to buy standing. It is a subscription, not a charitable donation, and it is not tax-deductible.
If that ever changes, you will read it here first. If we add a revenue source — a retailer paying for faster coverage of its catalogue, say — we will describe it on this page before it begins, along with what it does and does not touch. What will not change is the firewall: no payment from anyone buys a different score. A score that money can move is not worth publishing, and it is the only thing we actually sell.
We will publish the approximate breakdown of revenue by source on this page each year, once there is a full year of it to report.
Put it in front of you at checkout.
Install the extension and see the four indicators on every product page from the retailers we support.