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A plain application log can be edited by someone with access to it. To check whether an AI agent’s recorded actions were changed, verify signed event records or recompute a cryptographic hash chain, then compare the result with a trusted key or chain-head commitment kept outside the operator’s control. That can establish whether the captured records match the evidence. It cannot prove that every action was captured or that the agent’s actions were true or appropriate.

What an agent audit trail needs to capture

To answer “Show me what your agent did,” an auditor needs more than the agent’s final response. The record should preserve enough of the run to reconstruct how it reached that result and what it did along the way.

  • Trigger and identity: what initiated the run, and the relevant user, agent, session, or trace identifiers.
  • Decisions and policy outcomes: the decision made at each consequential point and whether a policy allowed, blocked, or changed it.
  • Tool activity: tool calls, relevant inputs and outputs, and execution results.
  • Delegation and provenance: which agent or component passed work to another, and how those steps relate to the initiating run.

A log that records only the final answer can be intact yet still leave an investigator unable to reconstruct the agent’s behavior. Capture coverage depends on the integrations around the agent, including tool gateways, identity and authorization services, external systems that receive side effects, and delegated agents. AWS Agentic AI Lens recommends recording agent decisions and actions in queryable, tamper-evident storage.

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What signatures and hash chains prove

Signed event records

A digital signature can let a verifier check whether an event’s signed bytes have changed, using the public key associated with the signing key. It supports attribution to that key; it does not by itself establish that the event description is truthful or that the agent performed no other actions.

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Hash chains

A hash chain links events so that changing a record changes the hashes that follow it. Recompute the chain in order and compare its calculated head—the final hash—with an expected head that was recorded independently. If the operator who can rewrite the events also controls the only copy of the expected head, that operator may be able to rewrite the events and calculate a replacement head.

An independently witnessed or published chain head gives an outside verifier a reference point. A symmetric key controlled by the same operator does not provide the same third-party verification as an asymmetric signature checked with a trusted public key. The Agent Flight Recorder preprint describes a design that combines recorded events with external anchoring; its reported performance and costs are results for the study’s evaluated configuration, not deployment guarantees.

How to check an agent log in five minutes

  1. Set the scope. Identify the incident time window, agent, session or trace ID, and action you are investigating.
  2. Collect the evidence. Obtain the exported events, signature or hash-chain metadata, the trusted public verification key where relevant, and the independently recorded chain-head commitment or timestamped digest.
  3. Verify the cryptography. Recompute event hashes in sequence and compare the resulting head with the independent commitment. For signed receipts, verify the signature over the canonical event bytes with the trusted public key.
  4. Flag mismatches and gaps. A failed signature, mismatched head, missing sequence, or absent expected commitment is an integrity issue or evidence gap. Do not accept a newly generated head from the operator as proof that an earlier record was unchanged.
  5. Check coverage separately. Compare the events with records from the tool gateway, identity and authorization service, external side-effect systems, and any delegated agents to look for actions outside the capture boundary.
  6. Write down the scope of the conclusion. Record the time range, artifacts checked, key and commitment used, missing evidence, and what the verification does and does not establish.

What a successful integrity check does—and does not—establish

A successful check establishes that the verified captured records match the data signed by the relevant key or the sequence represented by the independently trusted chain head. The exact assurance depends on who controls the key, storage, and reference commitment.

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It does not establish that the recorder saw every action, that an event’s contents are true, that the policy was appropriate, or that an action should have been allowed. A missing tool call remains missing even if every surviving event has a valid signature. A hash commitment also cannot restore event payloads that have been lost. Auditable Agents discusses agent auditing and tamper-evident records; its findings are specific to the projects and setup studied.

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Design the evidence store so the agent cannot rewrite it

Keep the audit record and its verification material outside the agent’s ordinary operational permissions. If the same role that runs the agent can freely edit or delete the log and replace its only integrity reference, the evidence is not independently trustworthy.

AWS’s implementation guidance describes isolating artifacts in a separate-account S3 store, restricting writes and overwrites, enabling versioning, and using CloudTrail log file validation. Its example uses SHA-256 hashes and RSA signatures in digest files, with Athena for querying. These are AWS-specific options, not requirements for every deployment; the essential design goal is separation between operational control and audit evidence. Read the AWS Agentic AI Lens guidance.

Immutability controls also have consequences. AWS warns that S3 Object Lock compliance mode cannot be reversed during its retention period and may prevent deletion needed for a right-to-be-forgotten request. Use it only where a specific regulatory need justifies it, and validate retention settings first; retention and legal obligations vary by jurisdiction and use case.

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Protect sensitive data and make records retrievable

Prompts, tool inputs, and outputs may contain personal information, secrets, or regulated data. Apply appropriate masking or redaction before long-term storage, while preserving enough evidence to investigate the event. Index records by useful identifiers such as time range, agent, session, and trace so an investigator can find a run without searching a raw archive.

When evaluating an audit design, consider lifecycle coverage, key and storage ownership, independent verification of the chain head, visibility of missing events or payloads, sensitive-data minimization and retention, and how quickly an investigator can query the evidence. Legal admissibility and retention requirements are specific to the deployment; tamper-evident logging alone does not establish compliance.

How to interpret published performance figures

Two 2026 research preprints report figures for their own evaluated systems. The authors of Auditable Agents report 617 security findings across six prominent open-source projects and 8.3 ms median overhead for the studied pre-execution mediation with tamper-evident records. The authors of Agent Flight Recorder report 48 microseconds median per event in their full-system evaluation and $2.30 per 100,000 events for Layer 2 anchoring at 100-event epochs. These figures are specific to the studies’ methods and configurations; they are not universal benchmarks or cost estimates for a production system.

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