Definition
Plain language
A trail showing where each piece of information came from.
As stated in the literature
Metadata describing the origin of a claim or artifact; in evidence-carrying agent and ScientistOne architectures, explicit tags linking statements to source documents, log lines, or code regions.
Also called: provenance link, provenance links
Why it matters: Without provenance you can't tell which parts of an AI's output are grounded in real sources and which were invented, making audits and corrections nearly impossible.
For example, a research agent's claim that a drug lowers blood pressure carries a tag pointing to the exact paragraph in the clinical trial report it came from.
Heard on the show
“" Which is why I think the paper is going to land harder than its single-author preprint provenance suggests.”Episode 020 — The Compliance Gap: Why AI Says Yes and Does No