What is governance chain of custody?
Governance chain of custody is the unbroken, attributed sequence of governance events that connects an AI system from registration through screening, classification, obligation mapping, evidence management, supervisor approval, and any re-screening.
Every link in the chain identifies who acted, what they decided, when, on what basis, and what evidence was available. If any link is missing — an unattributed approval, an undocumented change, a gap in the evidence trail — the chain is broken and the governance cannot be fully reconstructed.
Key points
- The chain connects every governance event: registration, intake, technical completion, screening, classification, obligation mapping, evidence review, approval, override, re-screening, and any corrective action.
- Each event in the chain has a named person, a timestamp, a decision or action taken, and a reference to the evidence and legal context available at that moment.
- The chain must survive personnel changes, system updates, and regulatory evolution. It cannot depend on any individual's memory or availability.
- A broken chain — where one event cannot be connected to the next — creates an audit gap that undermines all downstream governance decisions.
- Chain of custody is what distinguishes operational governance from project-based compliance: it is continuous, not episodic.
Why it matters
Most compliance failures are not failures of knowledge — organisations know what they should do. They are failures of chain: the screening was done but the approval was informal, the evidence was collected but not linked to the obligation, the re-screening was triggered but not documented. Governance chain of custody makes these gaps structurally impossible by enforcing an unbroken sequence from system registration to current governance state.
How EAB approaches this
EAB's Governance Chain of Custody is the structural backbone of the platform. Every governance action is logged as an event in the chain. The Governance Flow enforces the sequence. Supervisor Approval cannot proceed without prior screening. Evidence Readiness surfaces gaps before they break the chain. The audit trail preserves the complete chain for any AI system at any point in time.