Auditability and Transparency

The system SHALL maintain decision logs for all autonomous decisions with sufficient detail for post-hoc reconstruction.

Exportable audit artifacts SHALL be provided in standardized formats accessible to third-party auditors.

Version control SHALL be maintained for all system components, configurations, and policies with full change history.

Third-party audit replay SHALL be supported enabling independent assessors to reproduce and evaluate system behavior.

The system SHALL support third-party audit replay from logged data.

Retention policies SHALL ensure audit data is preserved for a period appropriate to the system's risk classification.

Compliance evidence generation capabilities SHALL map system records to specific ACR requirements.

Chain of custody SHALL be maintained for all evidence artifacts used in certification and ongoing compliance.

Automated compliance reporting against the ARA Standard's requirements SHALL be supported.

Audit mechanisms SHALL NOT introduce performance degradation that affects system reliability.

Access controls for audit data SHALL prevent unauthorized access while enabling legitimate review.

The system SHALL provide transparency reports documenting system behavior trends, incident summaries, and compliance status.

Audit log immutability SHALL be enforced through cryptographic or append-only storage mechanisms.

The system SHALL support granular audit queries by time range, action type, decision outcome, and entity.

Audit data SHALL include sufficient metadata for correlation with external compliance and regulatory records.

The system SHALL log all access to audit data itself, creating an audit trail of audit trail access.

System documentation SHALL be maintained at a level of detail sufficient for independent technical review.

The system SHALL support evidence artifact linking that traces from certification decisions back to source data.

Audit capabilities SHALL cover the full lifecycle from input receipt through decision to action execution and outcome.

The system SHALL preserve audit trail integrity during system failures and recovery procedures.

Multi-party audit support SHALL be available for systems operating across organizational boundaries.

The system SHALL generate human-readable explanations of autonomous decisions upon authorized request.

Audit data schema changes SHALL be backward-compatible to maintain historical audit query capability.

Compliance status dashboards SHALL provide real-time visibility into ACR compliance across all domains.

The AVB SHALL produce a documented Risk Classification Report as part of every Deployment Certification evaluation. The report SHALL address all seven classification factors (degree of autonomy, consequence severity, reversibility, breadth of impact, regulatory context, dependency criticality, operational continuity), state the resulting Assurance Class, and provide justification for the determination.

The Risk Classification Report SHALL be delivered to the deploying organization and to ARAF as part of the certification evidence package. The organization SHALL sign acknowledgment of the assigned Assurance Class before certification is granted.