What it is
An audit trail is a log of every action taken by or through an AI agent, with decision metadata. Each entry captures: the agent identity, the action attempted (tool call), the policy verdict, the policy rule that matched, and the timestamp.
Critically, the audit trail is append-only and tamper-evident. New entries are added, and altering or deleting an existing entry is detectable rather than silent. This is typically enforced by writing to a system the agent process doesn't control: a dedicated audit log service, a write-once storage system, or an external compliance database.
Why it matters
Two reasons: forensics and compliance. If something goes wrong, the audit trail provides a complete record of exactly what the agent attempted, in what order, and what policy decisions were made. This is essential for incident response: did the agent attempt the deletion or was it the human operator?
For compliance, regulators ask: prove that you have controls in place. SOC2 Type II audits require "continuous monitoring evidence" — a trail showing that every action was evaluated. ISO 27001 requires "access control evidence" — proof that only authorized subjects accessed protected resources. An append-only, hash-chained audit trail produces exactly this kind of monitoring and access-control record — though Intercis itself is not SOC2 or ISO 27001 certified.
How it works
When the proxy makes a governance decision, it logs the decision on a best-effort basis: agent ID, action details, policy rule applied, decision, timestamp. The write never blocks the agent, so a failed allow or observe write is dropped and a deny record falls back to a local spool. The log entry is written to a system outside the agent's trust boundary, so a compromised or misbehaving agent cannot modify the audit log it doesn't control.
The logs are queryable and exportable. For forensics, you might ask: "What did agent-trading-bot attempt between 3pm and 4pm?" For compliance, you export the full month's log and submit it to an auditor.
How Intercis implements it
Intercis maintains an append-only, hash-chained audit log of proxy interception events. Each log entry includes: agent ID, tool call content, verdict, policy, timestamp, and a per-row SHA-256 event_hash that chains each entry to the one before it. The log is tamper-evident — entries have no UPDATE or DELETE path and each is hash-chained, so the agent process cannot alter entries it didn't write, and edits to written rows are detectable. Logging is best-effort, so the log is not a guarantee that every event is present.
The log is queryable from the dashboard, and the event view exports the currently-filtered records to CSV. SIEM integration and scheduled SOC 2 submission packages are not available today.
Related terms
- AI Agent Governance — The broader discipline the audit trail supports.
- Human-in-the-Loop — the human-review (escalate) decision, a concept Intercis does not run as a live verdict today.