Operational opacity

The condition in which an automated decision cannot be audited because the environment around it went unrecorded, an absent seed, an unpinned library, a container image nobody hashed, a time zone database that has since been revised, rather than because a network’s reasoning is inaccessible in principle. The remedy is a provenance envelope captured at the moment of inference and a replay grade declared in advance, since an account of a decision that cannot be rerun can be checked against nothing.