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Show HN: OSS AI agent that indexes and searches the Epstein files (epstein.trynia.ai)

211 points by jellyotsiro ↗ HN
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.

Code: https://github.com/nozomio-labs/nia-epstein-ai

28 comments

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tehjoker
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?
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iowemoretohim
Those are going to be some spicy hallucinations.
dfxm12
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.

nubg
Does this work with vector embeddings?
andy_ppp
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.
sschueller
Is it able to handle a much larger dataset? Only a tiny fraction of data has been release from what is looks like.
thecopy
Reminder that only 1-2% of the files have been released.
wartywhoa23
The question is not how to analyze that, it's how to prosecute those who are above the law.
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Imustaskforhelp
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!

axegon_
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.
slfreference
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.

gregw2
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.

ck2
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)

darepublic
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
kevin_thibedeau
It would be nice to have a way to query the exposed redactions to audit which of them were in violation of the Act.
onionisafruit
> 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

nathan_compton
Why the heck does this start with some sort of video bullshit?