Agent Audit Trail
An agent audit trail is a tamper-evident record of every governance decision and action an AI agent took — what it attempted, which policy decided the outcome, who approved it, and what resulted — kept for compliance, forensics, and accountability.
Definition
An agent audit trail is a tamper-evident record of every governance decision and action an AI agent took — what it attempted, which policy decided the outcome, who approved it, and what resulted — kept for compliance, forensics, and accountability.
What a good audit trail records
For agents, logs are not enough; auditors and incident responders need a defensible record. A strong audit trail captures each action's intent, the policy decision applied (ALLOW, DENY, REQUIRE_APPROVAL, ALLOW_WITH_CONSTRAINTS), any human approval and who gave it, and the result — including whether output was redacted or quarantined. The question it must answer is precise: which policy allowed this agent to take this action, and can you prove the record has not been altered?
Tamper-evidence and export
Cordum keeps an append-only, hash-chained audit log per tenant: each event carries a sequence number, its own hash, and the previous event's hash, so any insertion, deletion, or reordering is detectable. A verification endpoint walks the chain and reports gaps, and a SIEM exporter streams events to webhook, syslog, Datadog, or CloudWatch backends. Legal hold can exempt a time range from retention trimming. Together these make the audit trail not just a log but admissible evidence.
Frequently asked questions
What makes an audit trail tamper-evident?
Hash-chaining. Each event includes its own hash and the previous event's hash, so altering, removing, or reordering any entry breaks the chain. A verification pass can then detect exactly where the tampering or gap occurred.
Can the audit trail be exported to a SIEM?
Yes. Cordum streams audit events to external backends — webhook, syslog, Datadog, or CloudWatch — so agent governance evidence lands in your existing security and compliance tooling alongside the rest of your logs.
Related reading
Govern your AI agents with Cordum
Cordum is the agent control plane: policy-before-dispatch enforcement, human approvals, and a tamper-evident audit trail for autonomous AI agents.