An auditor asks for the record of what the system did: the interaction, the control that applied to it, the authority it ran under, and proof the record has not changed since it was written. Completeness is the property under examination. A record covering some of the runs answers for those runs and leaves the rest undocumented.
Akka Verify writes a non-sampled, cryptographically hash-chained interaction log. Every event embeds the identity, the permissions and the policy bindings resolved at the moment the action executed.
Observability tools sample by design. Keeping one run in a hundred holds the storage bill down and preserves the shape of a latency distribution, which is what those tools report on.
An auditor examining one loan decision needs that decision. A sampled log holds it at whatever rate the sampler was configured for, and the gap cannot be filled afterwards, because the run has completed and the state it held is gone.
Akka captures every interaction into petabyte-scale storage, indexed and queryable, and the log is non-sampled by contract.
EU AI Act Article 11 sets a ten-year floor for technical documentation. Article 26 sets a six-month floor for automatically generated logs. DORA requires five years or more for financial firms. A ninety-day window sold as a billing tier is shorter than every one of those.
Akka maps retention to those floors across explicit categories: the interaction log, trace tiers, Annex IV documentation, evidence exports, the held-execution archive, and the audit and change log. Legal hold is a first-class operation, so a record under hold survives the expiry its category would otherwise apply.
A trace records timing and structure for an engineer debugging a request. An evidence record carries the decision, the authority behind it, and a chain that proves the record was not altered. Traces are sampled and can be edited after they are written.
The permissions and policy bindings in force at execution are visible to the runtime that propagated them. A component receiving a copy of the interaction afterwards receives the content without the authority it ran under.
Recomputing the chain over an exported set shows whether any record was removed or changed, because each event carries a hash of the event before it. The check runs on the export the auditor holds.
Legal hold is applied by the compliance owner and suspends retention expiry for the records it covers. A record under hold is retained until the hold is released.
Evaluation and evidence capture work against agents built elsewhere. The authority snapshot requires the runtime to propagate identity through each call, which means the agent runs on Akka.
