> Markdown twin of https://adna.network/provenance-audit/
> Index: https://adna.network/llms.txt · Full corpus: https://adna.network/llms-full.txt
> State is a build-time snapshot generated 2026-09-11 (UTC); nothing here is live.
> Derived from the rendered page — this route has no markdown source.

# Provenance & audit

Auditors ask five questions about AI-assisted work. The vault answers all five
using the same files the team already edits — the audit trail is the working
artifact, not a parallel workstream. For compliance officers, security reviewers,
and procurement leads; the sibling [enterprise adoption checklist](/use-cases/enterprise-team/) organizes the same evidence by evaluation domain.

## 1 · Who wrote this artifact?

Every governed file carries `last_edited_by` and `updated`
in its frontmatter; the matching session file in `how/sessions/`
records intent and scope. Attribution scales from a single frontmatter line up
to a full session narrative.

- **Frontmatter attribution:** `last_edited_by: agent_{username}` on every content file.
- **Session-level attribution:** session file opens with ID, intent, and scope — a reviewable work-unit narrative, not just a file-level diff.
- **Git as second witness:** every commit is attributed and dated; session records cross-reference the commit.

[Session Glossary Every agent-assisted work unit produces a file in how/sessions/ with session ID, intent, scope, files touched, and a closing SITREP — the primitive audit…](/glossary/glossary-session)[SITREP Glossary Structured session closure (Completed / In progress / Next up / Blockers / Files touched) plus a Next Session Prompt — turns a session close into a reviewable…](/glossary/glossary-sitrep)[Enterprise Team Use Case Narrative walkthrough: a 50-person platform org replaces week-long compliance investigations with scripted queries over the session corpus.](/use-cases/enterprise-team)

## 2 · What context did the agent have?

Agent output is only as good as its inputs. The session file names the intent
and files consulted; the [context engineering](/learn/concepts/context-optimization) layer makes the context-assembly rules explicit. Reviewers
answer "what was the agent told to do, with what reference material" without
re-running the agent.

- **Session intent:** every session file names the stated objective at the top.
- **Context inputs:** routing files (AGENTS.md) and context recipes name which knowledge objects the agent loaded — traceable, not opaque.
- **Scope declaration:** Tier-2 sessions declare scope and run a conflict scan before editing shared configuration; the declared scope is part of the audit record.

## 3 · Was the work reviewed?

Review is structurally required: `CLAUDE.md` names standing orders;
`who/governance/` holds role definitions; every multi-session
mission closes with an AAR under `how/missions/artifacts/` before
it can be marked complete.

- **Standing orders:** CLAUDE.md at the vault root names the rules that apply to every session — including the rule that every mission gets an AAR before closure.
- **Review artifacts:** the AAR template (Worked / Didn't / Finding / Change / Follow-up) is mandatory on mission close, producing a short, structured review record.
- **Escalation cascade:** anomalies propagate session → mission → campaign → STATE.md, so a reviewer can follow a flag from discovery to resolution.

[Governance Files CLAUDE.md, MANIFEST.md, STATE.md, AGENTS.md at the vault root — the fixed-path governance layer auditors orient to once and reuse across every team vault.](/learn/concepts/governance-files)[Architecture Decisions ADR files under what/decisions/ pair each technical choice with rationale, trade-offs, and reviewer attribution — designed for both engineering and compliance…](/patterns/dual-audience-writing)[Collision Prevention last_edited_by + updated + read-before-write contract prevents concurrent agents and humans from clobbering one another — the primitive that makes a shared…](/glossary/glossary-collision-prevention)

## 4 · What stops two agents from clobbering each other?

The [collision-prevention](/glossary/glossary-collision-prevention)
contract is three frontmatter fields plus one procedural rule:
`last_edited_by`, `updated`, and read-before-write.
Git closes the loop — the authoritative history is the HEAD commit, not any
agent's in-memory belief.

- **Read before write:** no file is modified without reading current state first — catches stale-state edits.
- **Updated-date check:** if `updated` is today and the current agent didn't make the last edit, the agent pauses and confirms — a lightweight merge-conflict substitute.
- **Truth hierarchy:** git HEAD outranks any agent's cached read or memory; authoritative state is what's committed.

## 5 · How is the audit trail preserved?

A vault's history is append-only by convention. Sessions move from
`active/` to `history/YYYY-MM/` on completion; missions
and campaigns are archived with `status: completed` or
`abandoned`, never deleted. Standing order #6 ("archive, never
delete") applies to every governance artifact.

- **Archive, never delete:** session records, mission files, and campaign documents are a permanent audit trail.
- **Monthly partitioning:** session history under `how/sessions/history/YYYY-MM/` — scan by month, query by quarter, no ORM required.
- **Queryable with standard tools:** sessions and ADRs are YAML-headed markdown — `grep`, `jq`, `yq` read them.

[Federation Readiness Six-point readiness check (schema valid, opt-in, source instance, license, keywords, resolved references) gates every artifact that crosses a team boundary.](/patterns/federation-readiness)[FAIR Envelope License, creators, keywords, provenance, and identifier travel with every federated artifact — legal provenance is a data field, not a separate document.](/patterns/fair-envelope)[Open Standard The specification is open and permissively licensed — no vendor lock-in, no platform dependency. Vault contents are plain markdown in git.](/learn/concepts/open-standard)

## How this maps to named regimes

**Read this first.** aDNA is an open documentation standard, not a certified
product — adopting it does not make you compliant with anything. What a vault gives you is
*working evidence*: dated, attributed records a reviewer can read. Certification is
granted by accredited assessors against your own controls, never by adopting a standard.

With that caveat, the same audit trail lines up cleanly with what the frameworks
procurement teams cite actually ask reviewers to demonstrate:

Framework What it asks for What an aDNA vault supplies

SOC 2 Evidence that security and change-management controls operate over time — who changed what, when, and whether it was reviewed. Session records in how/sessions/ plus git history give a per-change, dated, attributed trail; the AAR-on-close rule is a recurring review control; STATE.md tracks open risks.

ISO/IEC 27001 A documented management system: policies, defined roles, risk treatment, and records showing the system is actually followed. CLAUDE.md carries the standing orders and priority hierarchy; who/governance/ defines roles; what/decisions/ (ADRs) record risk-bearing choices with rationale — documented-and-followed, in plain markdown.

EU AI Act For higher-risk AI use: record-keeping, human oversight, and traceability of how an AI-assisted output was produced. Every agent-assisted change names its intent, inputs, and reviewer; phase and mission gates are explicit human-oversight points; the trail from output → session → context inputs is the traceability the Act asks for.

## Self-reference: this vault is the worked example

The audit trail described here is the one this vault runs on — including the
session that produced this page. Browse `how/sessions/history/`
and read a few closed sessions end-to-end to evaluate the audit model directly.

## Next Steps

[Enterprise Team The sibling surface: a structured evaluation framework across governance, session audit, federation, and integration — plus the pain points, ontology…](/use-cases/enterprise-team/)[Federation Readiness Pattern The readiness-gate pattern in full — what blocks publication, what travels with a shared artifact, how version policy works across teams.](/patterns/federation-readiness)[Session Glossary Canonical definition of the session record — the atomic unit of the audit trail.](/glossary/glossary-session)

## Set up your workspace

[Get Started](/get-started/) [Read the governance model](/reference/governance-model/)