Beginner · Safety

Agent Transparency

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Making an agent's identity, authority, reasoning, and actions legible to the humans and systems it interacts with.

Technical Definition

Making an agent's identity, authority, reasoning, and actions legible to the humans and systems it interacts with.

How it works

Transparency means a person can see that they are dealing with an agent, on whose behalf it acts, what it is permitted to do, what it did and why, and how to contest or stop it. It spans disclosure (labelling machine actors), explanation (surfacing the plan and the sources used), and inspectability (accessible logs and evidence). Increasingly it is also a regulatory expectation rather than a courtesy, and it is the practical prerequisite for calibrated agent trust.

Related Concepts

• Agent Trust — The calibrated confidence a system or person places in an agent, grounded in verified identity, bounded authority, and observed behaviour.
• Agent Action Evidence — Verifiable records proving what an agent did, under whose authority, with what inputs and result.
• Agent Audit Trail — The chronological, tamper-resistant record of an agent's decisions, tool calls, and context sources.
• Explainable AI (XAI) — A set of techniques that allow humans to understand the output of AI models, especially deep learning models.