The Coral Index

A daily 0-100 reading of how the day’s AI news lands for working authors. 50 is neutral. Above 50 the day’s graded stories skew favourable to authors; below 50 they skew against.

How it is calculated

Every story reaching the Coral Wire desk is graded by an Anthropic Claude model for relevance to working authors (0-10), for sentiment and for urgency. Stories scoring 6 or higher on a given day are combined into one 0-100 reading: each contributes its sentiment sign (positive +1, negative -1, mixed -0.3, neutral 0) weighted by relevance score and by urgency (high 1.0, medium 0.7, otherwise 0.4); the weighted mean is rescaled onto a 0-100 scale on which 50 is neutral, the top of the scale is a day of uniformly good news for authors and the bottom a day of uniformly bad news. Where an edition was published with its own editorial index, that human number is the published value and the computed one is carried alongside it. Part of the corpus was graded with an earlier label vocabulary (opportunity/threat, breaking/today/this_week); those stories contribute at neutral sign and the baseline urgency weight. This is an editorial judgement measure over a curated news corpus. It is not a survey, not a market statistic, and not a sample of any population.

What it is not

The Coral Index is an editorial judgement measure over the stories Coral Wire collects. It is not a survey of authors, not a market or financial statistic, and it carries no margin of error because it is not sampled from a population. Days with few graded stories move further on less evidence — the story count is published alongside every value so you can see that.

The series

Published values from 2026-06-25 to 2026-10-06. Provenance: daily_capture: 45 day(s); live_view: 1 day(s); recomputed_backfill: 50 day(s). Values marked recomputed were produced by running the same formula over the stored story corpus on the day the archive was first written, not captured live on the day they describe; values marked daily_capture were written on the day itself. No value has ever been estimated, smoothed or invented.

Get the data

The full daily series is served as JSON at https://coralwire.ai/api/coral-index.json. No key, no rate limit, no charge.

Citing and embedding

Free to quote, chart, embed and republish, in any medium including AI-generated answers, on one condition: name Coral Wire and link to https://coralwire.ai/data/coral-index. Suggested citation: Coral Index, Coral Wire (coralwire.ai).

Embed today’s number

<iframe src="https://coralwire.ai/embed/coral-index" width="260" height="150" style="border:0;overflow:hidden" title="The Coral Index — Coral Wire" loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font:12px sans-serif">Source: <a href="https://coralwire.ai/data/coral-index">The Coral Index</a>, Coral Wire.</p>

The badge updates itself every day. See also the AI Tool Leaderboard and the edition archive.