--- title: "False bind" summary: "A false bind is Entity Bind's name for the error it treats as unacceptable: a record attached to the wrong company entity and returned as a decided match." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # False bind > A false bind is Entity Bind's name for the error it treats as unacceptable: a record attached to the wrong company entity and returned as a decided match. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Measurement ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under measurement](https://entitybind.com/glossary#measurement). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What false bind means A false bind is a submitted record attached to an existing entity that is not the company the record describes, and returned as a match rather than as an abstention or a shortlist. It is narrower than 'false positive', and it is the error a caller cannot detect, because the answer arrives with the same shape and the same confidence field as a correct one. The design consequence is that the system prefers under-merging everywhere the two conflict: the adjudication stage is instructed to prefer under-merge, conflicting strong identifiers are a decisive non-match rather than a tie-break, and the clustering step refuses transitive merges across a contradiction. Each of those choices costs coverage, and the coverage they cost is visible in the per-tier resolution rates. The measured result on the live-adjudicated recording of 2026-08-29 is 0 false binds. Zero wrong bindings were observed across the historical six-shape recording and the separate domain fixture. Observed correctness was 1.0000 on accepted outcomes; this does not guarantee an error-free new workload. There is an adversarial version of the same test, in which the context supplied alongside the name is wrong. In the historical 50-record wrong-town fixture, 72% resolved and zero wrong bindings were observed. This is a measured adversarial sample, not a guarantee for every misleading description. That is the behaviour the whole cascade is built to produce: bad evidence should degrade an answer into an abstention, never into a confident wrong one. Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Precision, recall and abstention](https://entitybind.com/guides/precision-recall-and-abstention): The precision-recall trade-off is usually described as a two-way choice, and in entity resolution that description is wrong. There is a third output — declining… - [The accuracy method](https://entitybind.com/accuracy): Every published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail. - [How it works](https://entitybind.com/how-it-works): The seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [False positive](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive): A false positive in entity resolution is a pair of records asserted to be the same entity when they are not — the error class that corrupts data rather than merely leaving it untidy. - [Abstention](https://entitybind.com/glossary/abstention): An abstention is a first-class 'we do not know' returned instead of a match: the record comes back unresolved, with a ranked shortlist, a typed reason and the column that would have decided it. - [Confidence floor](https://entitybind.com/glossary/confidence-floor): A confidence floor is the score below which a system refuses to return a match at all, expressed as an acceptance contract rather than as a promise about accuracy. - [Over-merge](https://entitybind.com/glossary/over-merge): An over-merge is a cluster containing records from more than one real entity — the failure that turns two customers, two suppliers or two counterparties into one. - [Decision receipt](https://entitybind.com/glossary/decision-receipt): A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [KYC and onboarding](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/kyc-and-onboarding) (Use case): Counterparty identity with a receipt that survives seven years. - [Entity binding failures in AI agents](https://entitybind.com/guides/entity-binding-failures-in-ai-agents) (Guide): An entity binding failure is an agent calling the right tool on the wrong real-world entity. What a 2026 study of 1,800 runs found, and four safeguards. ## The other 13 terms on this shelf How you tell whether any of it worked, and which numbers may not be quoted without which other numbers. - [Precision](https://entitybind.com/glossary/precision) - [Recall](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall) - [F1 score](https://entitybind.com/glossary/f1) - [B-cubed (B³)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/b-cubed) - [Pairwise metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pairwise-metrics) - [Cluster metrics](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster-metrics) - [Recall@k](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall-at-k) - [Calibration](https://entitybind.com/glossary/calibration) - [Expected calibration error (ECE)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/expected-calibration-error) - [Wilson interval](https://entitybind.com/glossary/wilson-interval) - [False positive](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive) - [Over-merge](https://entitybind.com/glossary/over-merge) - [Fragmentation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fragmentation) Previous, alphabetically: [F1 score](https://entitybind.com/glossary/f1) · Next, alphabetically: [False positive](https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-positive) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/false-bind, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.