Chain of custody
The unbroken, accountable line from where a record is created to the organization's ability to retrieve and present it, intact, on demand. Broken most often by an inaccessible vendor boundary or by internal decay (overwrite, undocumented retention, unreadable migration); a record whose chain is broken is, at demand time, evidence you do not have.
Defined in 4 GAGE programs, which carry 13 distinct definitions of it. The wording above is taught in AI Governance: Applied Mastery.
How each discipline defines it
The same term does different work depending on who is using it. These are the definitions as each program teaches them, unedited.
In investigative and legal contexts, the documented, unbroken record of who has handled a piece of evidence (including a recording) and how, used to establish that evidence has not been altered or tampered with; referenced in this topic as an example of how professionals verify audio evidence through documented process rather than confident listening alone.
The unbroken, accountable line from where a record is created to the organization's ability to retrieve and present it, intact, on demand. Broken most often by an inaccessible vendor boundary or by internal decay (overwrite, undocumented retention, unreadable migration); a record whose chain is broken is, at demand time, evidence you do not have.
A documented, verifiable record of who has handled a dataset or model, and what was done to it, at each step from original collection to its current use; the absence of a chain of custody is itself a Layer 1 and Layer 2 provenance gap.
The discipline of being able to state, for any piece of evidence, who captured it, when, and whether anyone has altered it since, so a finding can be defended under later scrutiny rather than merely asserted.
The documented, unbroken record of who collected a piece of evidence, when, and every subsequent person who accessed or handled it, which lets an outside party trust the evidence was not altered along the way.
Where it is taught
The exact lessons this term appears in. The first 7 topics of every program are free with a free account.
- After the Incident · Rollout, Monitoring, and Incident Response, Agentic AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- The vendor's black box: forcing provenance answers from a supplier who has none · Poison, Leaks, and the Adversary, AI Data Governance: The Data Chair
- Pipeline forensics: reconstructing what the data did when the logs disagree · Data Incidents, AI Data Governance: The Data Chair
- Auditing your own data: provenance, gaps, and quiet poison · Data Reality, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- The conformity file: assembling the evidence for the system you shipped in Module 3 · The EU AI Act: The Executive Map, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- The agent audit trail: logging actions so you can reconstruct any decision it made · Agents Under Command, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- Evidence is designed, not gathered: building systems whose proof exists before anyone asks · Evidence Engineering, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- The evidence annex: wiring every artifact so the Module 13 audit finds a paper trail, not a scramble · Evidence Engineering, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- Incident forensics: reconstructing a failure from logs when memories disagree · Adversarial Governance, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
- Assembling the dossier: every artifact, every decision, one evidence file · The Capstone: The Board Audit and Viva, AI Governance: Applied Mastery
Terms it appears with
Not an alphabetical neighbourhood: these are the terms taught in the same lessons, ranked by how often they appear together.