Action State releases open-source receipts for AI-agent actions

Action State has released its EvidenceBook tooling for AI-agent actions as open-source software. It gives organizations a way to turn selected agent activity into portable, tamper-evident records that another party can inspect without relying on the operator’s dashboard.

Those receipts can show which steps an agent sealed and whether the sealed records were changed later. A customer, partner, auditor, or regulator can receive the disclosed bundle and run the verifier offline, without an Action State account or access to the operator’s systems. The check covers signatures and log inclusion, but it still requires signing keys that the recipient has independently trusted or pinned.

The proof has hard limits. A valid receipt does not establish that the events it describes actually occurred, while a missing step cannot reveal whether an operator failed to capture it. The records also do not, by themselves, prove authorization, real-world outcomes, or a complete history. That distinction follows the broader transparency model described in the SCITT architecture: registration can establish that an issuer produced a statement even when the statement itself is false.

When activity crosses company boundaries, Action State’s proposed model lets each side keep its own sealed record and disclose selected evidence for comparison. The records can show where the parties agree, conflict, or leave a point unconfirmed. Agreement between them, however, is still not proof that the underlying event happened. Because the evidence travels as a portable bundle, either side can retain and recheck it after access to the other organization’s systems or vendor service ends.

Action State also offers a public transparency service for external checkpoints. The witness receives a digest and timestamp, or a signed checkpoint covering a local log, rather than prompts, payloads, reasoning, personally identifiable information, or receipt contents. It appends the digest to an RFC 9162 Merkle log and returns a COSE inclusion receipt designed for offline verification. The relevant COSE Receipts standard defines inclusion and consistency proofs.

A witnessed checkpoint can show that a signed snapshot was externally registered and that disclosed records fall within the covered history. It is not, on its own, a per-record proof, nor does it establish trusted time, continuity, truth, authorization, or outcome. The current witness also operates as a single service: users can verify signatures, inclusion, and consistency from the returned bytes, but detecting inconsistent views across users would require an independent witness or another transparency service.

Keeping source data local carries a privacy caveat. The documentation on hash privacy warns that hashes of low-entropy values, such as short amounts or known identifiers, may be guessable and recommends salting those values before hashing.