Audit

TRACE shipped a signed record that proves who wrote it and not what the chip did, and its own documentation says so. Its sponsor wound down seven weeks after the Linux Foundation adopted it, and the compliance frameworks it was built for have no slot for it.

Deep Fathom introduced the 'compliance fabric' in its April launch release. Six months later OpsDesk, Aperion, and Cyberdes are all selling one, each leaning on the same evidence-automation idea. A category-level audit of that promise.

An agent is a loop whose branches are decided at runtime by the model, which a fixed control catalog like CMMC cannot enumerate. Access Control and Audit and Accountability break first. The emerging fix moves authorization outside the loop and makes the execution trace the audit artifact.

Three years of LLM security were spent on the input. The next boundary is proving what an agent did after the prompt left the model, which means turning execution traces into audit trails that are complete, tamper-evident, and portable across vendors.

Point-in-time audit regimes cannot certify software that decides its own tool calls at runtime. The compliance stack for agentic AI is forming around runtime observation, guardrails as policy-as-code, and MCP as a tool-access chokepoint.