Provenance

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What an agent job's provenance record holds

job and run ID
source URI or system record ID
source version, owner and effective date
retrieval query and eligibility filters
retrieved passage or record identifier
parser, index, embedding and ranking versions
model and runtime version
tool calls and transformations
output or action influenced
approval and acceptance record
correction, revocation or deletion event

Not every reader needs every field. The system needs enough to investigate an error, reproduce a material decision where possible, honour a deletion request through its derived copies, and tell primary evidence apart from generated interpretation.

Why it becomes commercial

When software produces work a customer pays for, provenance is what allows the supplier to defend the result, correct it, or accept that it was wrong.

A briefing whose claims cannot be traced to a permitted, current source is difficult to review, difficult to correct and difficult to stand behind in a dispute. The same record that makes an agent inspectable is the record that makes the service sellable.

Deletion has to reach the copies

Information flows into chunks, embeddings, indexes, memories, traces and backups. A deletion that removes the original but leaves a derived copy influencing new jobs has not been honoured.

Tracking lineage forward is what makes that reachable, which is why provenance and retention policy are the same design problem.