Intermediate · Safety

PBOM (Pipeline Bill of Materials)

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

TL;DR. A machine-readable manifest of everything in an AI pipeline — models, prompts, tools, data sources, and their versions and trust levels — so deployments can be audited and reproduced.

Technical Definition

A machine-readable manifest of everything in an AI pipeline — models, prompts, tools, data sources, and their versions and trust levels — so deployments can be audited and reproduced.

How it works

PBOM extends the bill-of-materials idea from components (SBOM) and context (CxBOM) to whole AI pipelines. A PBOM records which model versions serve an application, which prompts and templates ship with them, which tools and data feeds they can touch, and which guardrails and evaluators gate the release. Because agentic systems change constantly — prompts are edited, tools are swapped, models are upgraded silently by vendors — a static audit goes stale within weeks; the PBOM is meant to be generated and versioned by the deployment pipeline itself. Security and compliance teams consume it to answer 'what exactly changed in this release?' and to block deploys whose new components lack provenance or evaluation coverage.

Related Concepts

• Continuous Evals — Running evaluation suites continuously in production — on live traffic samples and every model or prompt change — instead of as a one-time pre-launch gate.
• CxBOM (Context-Window Bill of Materials) — A structured inventory of everything packed into an agent's context window — data sources, tools, memories, fetched documents — used to audit and secure what the model can actually see.
• Agent orchestration — Agent orchestration is the management of multiple AI agents or LLM calls to efficiently handle complex tasks.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) — An open standard from Anthropic that lets LLM apps connect to external tools, data sources, and prompts through a uniform client–server interface.