oaicite

An internal citation-placeholder token associated with ChatGPT that is reported to leak into visible model output when it fails to be stripped before display. First encountered by this vault in the 2026-09-20 capture on machine-text tells, where it appeared as the forensic artifact in the citation URLs of the 2025 White House MAHA report. What the token is mechanically rests, so far, only on ChatGPT's own self-description reposted to a user forum — no official OpenAI documentation was located.

Stamped as a watching stub because it is a genuinely emerging term with an unstable, officially-undocumented definition; the first-seen date is the point of the stub.

References

• claim-oaicite-token-flagged-maha-report-as-ai-generated

• 2026-09-28: OpenAI's official "Citation Formatting" API guide confirms, at Tier 1, that its models are trained to emit internal citation markers meant to be stripped before display — the general mechanism class behind the leak is now officially documented. But the guide's own marker family is named cite, using invisible private-use Unicode characters, not the plain bracketed oaicite:N string; the literal string "oaicite" does not appear anywhere in that documentation. The specific token's origin (legacy name superseded by cite, or an undocumented ChatGPT-product-only mechanism) is still unresolved (claim-openai-citation-formatting-guide-documents-internal-marker-stripping, claim-openai-cite-marker-name-not-oaicite, claim-oaicite-specific-token-unconfirmed-by-openai-staff).