Evidence Standard

The Evidence Standard defines how governance claims are supported through attributable, contemporaneous, and system-generated evidence.

1. Purpose of Governance Evidence

Governance evidence exists to demonstrate accountability.

For consequential decisions produced by autonomous systems, evidence records must allow institutions to answer three questions from contemporaneous records: who was responsible, what did they know, and what did they do.

2. Evidence Categories

ARAF evidence programs evaluate governance posture across four categories:

Design Evidence
Deployment Evidence
Operational Evidence
Outcome Evidence

Coverage across all four categories is required to support reconstructability.

3. Evidence Quality Requirements

Evidence used for governance assessment must satisfy four quality requirements:

Authenticity
Integrity
Traceability
Exportability

These requirements determine whether evidence can be independently relied upon by boards, insurers, investors, regulators, and assessors.

4. Evidence Tiers

ARAF classifies governance evidence into four quality tiers.

Tier	Evidence Type	Core Characteristics
Tier 1	Infrastructure-generated evidence	Contemporaneous, system-generated, and tamper-evident records produced directly by governance enforcement infrastructure (for example decision logs, enforcement actions, override and exception logs, drift outputs).
Tier 2	Contemporaneous documentation	Records created at the time of governance activity but not directly generated by technical enforcement infrastructure (for example governance meeting records, approvals, escalation logs, manual review records).
Tier 3	Reconstructed documentation	Records assembled retrospectively from available artefacts after the relevant governance activity occurred.
Tier 4	Management representation	Formal written representation where no contemporaneous record exists.

5. Admissibility by Certification Tier

Certification Tier	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 4
ARAF Assessed	Admissible	Admissible	Admissible with explicit qualification	Not admissible as primary evidence
ARAF Compliant	Required where structurally available	Admissible where Tier 1 is structurally unavailable	Not admissible for coherence determination	Not admissible
ARAF Certified	Required for at least 80% of sampled controls	Limited use where Tier 1 is structurally unavailable and no unresolved significant findings remain	Not admissible	Not admissible

If Tier 4 is the only available source for a control, the control must be assessed as not evidenced and the finding recorded accordingly.

6. Evidence Continuity Across the Decision Supply Chain

Autonomous outcomes are produced through a distributed Decision Supply Chain involving systems, human actors, and execution infrastructure. Governance evidence must follow the decision through each link in the chain.

A record that captures one link but omits upstream or downstream links is chain-incomplete and does not satisfy reconstructability requirements.

7. Evidence Infrastructure Certification

Governance infrastructure platforms may seek Evidence Infrastructure Certification to demonstrate that their telemetry outputs satisfy the evidentiary requirements of authenticity, integrity, traceability, and exportability.

For a detailed implementation specification of governance records architecture, see EIS-01. This standard defines the minimum structure of a compliant Tier 1 governance decision record under ARAF, including requirements for reconstructability, authority, and integrity.

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8. Coherence Assessment Window

For Compliant and Certified determinations, evidence must be sampled across the full operational coherence assessment window. The minimum window is 180 days, and the report must specify the exact window assessed.