Designing the Action Receipt: Ensuring Transparency and Auditability in Autonomous Multi-Agent Workflows

The paper proposes the concept of an action receipt: a structured, human-readable record of everything an agent did on a user's behalf during a delegated workflow. Drawing on precedents from financial auditing, medical documentation, data provenance standards, and regulatory frameworks including the GDPR, it develops design requirements, examines questions of granularity and tiered disclosure, considers technical implementation within existing agent protocols, and analyses how such records might address trust-calibration problems. Open challenges include information overload, receipt falsification by adversarial agents, cross-platform standardisation, and the privacy implications of retaining detailed activity logs.

Author: Akash Narayan (akashnarayan.com)