Audit log
Also called audit trail, audit record
A time-ordered record of who did what on a system, kept so that actions can be checked and reconstructed later.
An audit log is the record a system keeps of its own use: sign-ins, changes, exports, deletions, each with a time and an account. Nobody reads it on a normal day. It matters when something has gone wrong and you need to know who did it.
AI agents make that harder to read off. An agent that works with a person's access is checked against that person's rights, and the system may write down only that person's name. A misbehaving agent and a stolen account then look the same in the log.
So for agents the log needs more in it: the agent's identity, the tool it used, and the person it was acting for. And it has to be kept where the agent can't change it.
For example
A customer list was exported on a Sunday. The audit log shows which account did it, from where, and what it had done just before.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet audit log in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
Daily Bytes Plus is in the Android app.