Provenance
Provenance answers the last question: what happened? Every governed call emits a signed record to the Ledger — who acted, under whose delegation, what was decided, what the outcome was. You do not write audit logging on HUMΛN; you inherit it from the protocol.
The model
| Property | What it means |
|---|---|
| Signed | Each record is cryptographically signed at write time — tamper-evident, attributable |
| Attributed | Records name Passports, not usernames: the acting identity and the authorizing chain |
| Narrative | The Decision Ledger composes raw events into one curated story per consequential decision |
| Contestable | Challenge paths are part of the record — a decision that cannot be questioned is not accountable |
| Durable | Provenance outlives the session, the workflow, and the agent that produced it |
Receipts, not log lines
Raw event streams answer "what did the system emit?" Provenance answers "what happened, and on whose authority?" — a different question. When a compliance lead opens a decision in the Console, they see the sequence as a narrative: what ran, which gates fired, who approved, what was overridden and why, each step signed. It is the difference between grepping and knowing.
Verification without surveillance
Provenance is designed to make actions verifiable without making people watched. Records capture decisions and authority, governed by the same consent and visibility model as everything else on the protocol — the goal is receipts you can hand to an auditor, not a monitoring feed.
What emits provenance
Everything governed: agent calls through HumanOS, human decisions in Workforce queues, delegation grants and revocations, capability evidence in the graph, marketplace installs, learning-proposal approvals. If it changed something that matters, there is a receipt.
Work with provenance
- Patterns: the pattern library — every HumanOS orchestration pattern emits provenance as part of the flow
- Product view: Governance walks the Decision Ledger and challenge flows
- Console: the Audit surface in the Command Plane renders provenance as decision narratives
Next in the ladder: Workforce →