The category
Six questions people routinely confuse.
Most tools in this space answer one of these and are sold as though they answer all six. They are related. They are not the same capability, and buying the wrong one leaves you with a record that cannot answer the question you actually had.
| No. | The question | The capability | What it proves |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Who was permitted? | Access control and authorization | The policy boundary, before anything happened. |
| 02 | Who did what, when? | Activity or usage audit log | The recorded event. |
| 03 | Who made this thing? | Provenance and data lineage | An artifact’s origin and its changes. |
| 04 | Has it been altered? | Integrity and chain of custody | Continuity, handling, tamper evidence. |
| 05 | What did the agent have? | Agent evidence observability | What was presented or retrieved. |
| 06 | What did it actually check? | Decision-context and tool-use trace | The sources and instruments exercised. |
The distinction that trips everyone: who created what is not who did what. The first is provenance. The second is an activity log. And who created what still tells you nothing about what the thing that created it was looking at.
Audit logs describe events. Provenance describes artifacts. Chain of custody protects continuity. What we do is reconstruct the information and instruments surrounding a claim. That is rows five and six, and it is the one nobody was selling.
The record
Eight things, kept together.
Which agent, which model
Including the version, because behaviour changes between them.
What it was told
The instructions and the context it was working from.
What it went and found
Documents, memory, data sources, anything pulled in.
What it could have used
Which instruments were available at that moment. This is the one that lets you see what it skipped.
What it actually called
The tools it ran, and what came back.
Which evidence backs which claim
The link between a source and the sentence that leaned on it.
The order it happened in
Every retrieval, call and output, timed.
A seal on the whole thing
Tying the record to that exact output, so neither can be quietly edited afterwards.
The boundary
We cannot tell you what it knew.
Plenty of people will sell you a record of what an AI was thinking. Nobody can produce one. The model’s internal state is not observable from outside, and any product claiming otherwise is selling something it cannot show you.
So the claim here is narrower, and that is exactly why it holds up when somebody leans on it. We can preserve what was presented, what was retrieved, what was consulted, what was produced, and that the record has not changed since.
Signing does not turn an activity log into provenance, or provenance into evidence. It makes the captured record tamper-evident and binds it to the output somebody will audit later. That is a smaller promise and a keepable one.
Why a lab will not do this
Their log is built to run their product.
Every model vendor has operational logging. It exists to administer the service: uptime, quota, abuse, billing. It is a good log for that.
It is not designed to produce independent evidence that the vendor’s own model made an unsupported claim, ignored evidence that was sitting right there, or contradicted the results of its own tool calls. Nobody builds the instrument that indicts them, and it would be strange to expect it.
That is the whole reason this has to sit outside the model, and why we do not compete with the labs. We watch across them.
The other half
It also builds the thing.
The same platform makes software. Describe the annoying part of your week and it gets built: a calculator you use this afternoon at one end, a proper application with its own address at the other.
It sets up domains, databases and email, and deploys. We know it works because it is how our own products were built, including the infrastructure this site runs on.
What we are still wiring is the path from one typed sentence all the way to that, with nothing for you to configure. Ask for something bigger than one screen and we will tell you plainly where it sits today.