Definition
Plain language
A complete record showing who did what and when, so the work can be checked later.
As stated in the literature
A logged, attributable history of operations or decisions used for post-hoc verification; in CoE Integrity Audits, the chain of evidence linking each claim to its grounding source.
Why it matters: Without an audit trail, it's impossible to tell whether an AI's confident-sounding output is grounded in evidence or made up.
For example, an audit trail for an AI report links every cited claim back to the source document and the moment the agent retrieved it.
Heard on the show
“And it's an audit trail — every code change in the entire run traces back to the hypothesis that motivated it.”Episode 131 — Why Autonomous Research Agents Forget Their Own Lessons, and Arbor's Fix