04 · Evidence: can a third party verify all of it offline, years later?

Score a TRACE record against the specification¶

TRACE is an open format for signed receipts that say what an AI agent ran and what it did (the terms, in plain English). This suite takes one of those receipts, called a TRACE record, checks it against the TRACE specification, and tells you the highest conformance level it reaches. It writes a report anyone can reproduce from the record's digest (a fingerprint of its exact bytes) and the suite version. A pass covers that one record; it does not show that a whole product meets every requirement of the specification.

Score your first record What this proves, and what it does not

The eight modules each look at one part of a record: the envelope (the outer wrapper and its basic fields), the signature, the runtime (the hardware it says it ran on), the policy (the rules the agent ran under), the appraisal (a verifier's verdict on the hardware evidence), the transcript (the log of tool calls), transparency (proof the record was entered in a public log) and provenance (how the software was built). Read the limitations to see what each result does and does not tell you.

pip install agentrust-trace-tests
trace-tests verify --record path/to/trust-record.jwt --level 1

A report you can hand to someone else¶

verify prints results for you. report writes files you can give to someone who was not there, such as an auditor or a customer.

trace-tests report --record trust-record.json --html report.html --json report.json --badge trace.svg

• report tries every level up to --max-level, so the answer is the highest level the record reaches, whichever level you happened to ask about.
• The HTML report is a single file that loads nothing else: no scripts, no fonts, no outside stylesheets, no badge service, nothing fetched when it is opened.

To make a CI pipeline (the automated checks that run on every code change) fail below a level, add --fail-under 1. Without it the command always exits 0, which is what you want when you only need the report. report.json keeps a stable layout, schema: agentrust-io/trace-tests/report/1, for dashboards and CI.

CLI reports also carry a small pilot section that accounts for three specific checks one by one. It covers those three only, not all of TRACE.

Anyone can edit a report, so a report that looks official but cannot be checked is no better than a system vouching for itself. The report therefore tells a reader who does not trust the sender to check the record directly, and gives them what they need to do it.

Where to go next¶

• Conformance Levels: what each level requires, and what a record has to carry to reach it.
• Test Modules: the eight modules, the TR-* error codes they emit, and what each one checks.
• CI integration: gate a pipeline on a level, and write your own conformance tests against the suite.

Test modules¶

The table uses the specification's own terms. Each module's page explains them.

The suite tracks TRACE Spec v0.2. See Changelog for what moved between suite versions.

Status: agentrust-trace-tests 0.6.2 · Apache-2.0 · tracks TRACE Spec v0.2 · Sponsored by OPAQUE, which funds the engineering, infrastructure and confidential-computing work behind these projects.