Prompt Logs Are Not An Audit Trail

# Prompt Logs Are Not An Audit Trail

A saved prompt is not the same thing as an auditable record.

Prompt logs tell you part of the story: what was asked and what came back. That is useful. But an audit trail needs more than that. It needs the state around the request, the tools that were used, the result that was accepted or rejected, and the human or system actor who made the next consequential move.

## Auditability requires

- durable workflow identifiers
- recorded state transitions
- actor attribution
- evidence of approval, rejection, or override

## Why teams confuse the two

Prompt logs are easy to keep. Full auditability forces architecture decisions. It asks the team to model the workflow instead of treating it like a stream of messages.

## The practical risk

When a system misfires, prompt history alone rarely answers the operational question: who approved this and on what basis?

## Better standard

Log prompts, yes. But do not mistake convenience logging for a control framework.