Provenance
The recorded origin of a fact or output — what source it came from, and where.
category ▸ Data & Provenance
Provenance, in plain language.
Provenance is the documented lineage of information: for any fact an AI surfaces or any output it produces, provenance answers where it came from. At its finest grain — datapoint provenance — a single number on a report links back to the source document, page, and location it was drawn from.
Provenance is the antidote to the most dangerous AI failure mode: a confident, well-formatted answer with no basis in reality. When every figure carries its source, an ungrounded claim stands out instead of blending in, and a reviewer can verify rather than trust.
How Cortex implements it.
This term isn't abstract here — it maps to a real capability in the runtime. Here is exactly how Cortex enforces or relates to it.
Cortex pins each surfaced fact to its source through datapoint provenance — citations carry source, page, and bounding box, with an as-reported flag distinguishing a verbatim value from a derived one, and a value_hash proving the figure was not altered after extraction.
Ungrounded figures are flagged rather than silently asserted, and provenance threads into the broader lineage graph so a fact connects all the way back through the decision that used it.
Keep building the vocabulary.
These terms sit next to this one in the governed-AI model — follow the thread to see how the controls connect.
Trust Ledger
A tamper-evident, hash-chained record of every governed run, action, and approval.
Hash chain
A sequence of records where each one cryptographically includes the hash of the previous.
Tamper-evident
A record whose integrity can be proven — any change to it is detectable after the fact.
Ontology
The business object model — types, instances, and relationships — agents reason over.
See Provenance enforced, not just defined.
Join the waitlist and watch the controls in this glossary return real verdicts, seal real evidence, and trace every fact back to its source.