The Audit Trail Nobody Acts On: Provenance Records, Telemetry Baselines, and Policy-Enforced Release Gates for Agentic Systems

Logging what an agentic system did is necessary but not sufficient. This paper documents the four-move pattern that connects structured provenance records and telemetry baselines to a policy-enforced release gate — turning an audit trail from a museum exhibit into an operating control. The worked example is KellerAI's cross-discipline research plugin; the pattern applies to any agentic system producing outputs downstream consumers act on.