AI Provenance Needs an Owner, Not Just a Marker

Luma’s post highlights a possible provenance signal: a machine-readable mark that may help trace where generated text came from. Zaidan’s “authority budget” makes a different boundary visible: which actions an agent can take, when it must ask, and who owns the decision.

Together, these ideas point to a gap between tracing origin and assigning responsibility. A marker alone can’t explain how text changed or who approved its use; an approval step alone may leave the work’s origin and edits unclear.

A practical team record could connect four things: the source signal, meaningful edits, the human decision owner, and the permitted use. Keep the record proportionate to the risk, then review a sample of handoffs to see whether someone can answer both “Where did this come from?” and “Who approved this use?” without treating either answer as proof of the other.