Lesson 639 of 2244
AI Supply Chain Attestation: Knowing What's Actually In Your Stack
Modern AI deployments stack 5-10 vendor models, libraries, and services. When something goes wrong, you need to know exactly what's running where. Here's how to maintain real attestation.
Adults & Professionals · Safety & Governance · ~7 min read
The premise
AI deployments accumulate dependency layers that obscure what's actually running; attestation discipline maintains the visibility needed for safety and compliance.
What AI does well here
- Maintain a software bill of materials (SBOM) extended to AI components (models, training data sources, fine-tunes)
- Document model provenance for every deployed model (publisher, version, training data window, evaluation results)
- Track vendor changes — model upgrades happen continuously and can change behavior
- Audit access to ensure only known dependencies are in production
What AI cannot do
- Eliminate vendor risk entirely (some opacity is structural)
- Substitute attestation for actual security testing
- Predict downstream effects of every vendor model update
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