alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Open-Source Article 12 Logging Infrastructure for the EU AI Act
EU legislation (which affects UK and US companies in many cases) requires being able to truly reconstruct agentic events.
I've worked in a number of regulated industries off & on for years, and recently hit this gap.
We already had strong observability, but if someone asked me to prove exactly what happened for a specific AI decision X months ago (and demonstrate that the log trail had not been altered), I could not.
The EU AI Act has already entered force, and its Article 12 kicks-in in August this year, requiring automatic event recording and six-month retention for high-risk systems, which many legal commentators have suggested reads more like an append-only ledger requirement than standard application logging.
With this in mind, we built a small free, open-source TypeScript library for Node apps using the Vercel AI SDK that captures inference as an append-only log.
It wraps the model in middleware, automatically logs every inference call to structured JSONL in your own S3 bucket, chains entries with SHA-256 hashes for tamper detection, enforces a 180-day retention floor, and provides a CLI to reconstruct a decision and verify integrity. There is also a coverage command that flags likely gaps (in practice omissions are a bigger risk than edits).
The library is deliberately simple: TS, targeting Vercel AI SDK middleware, S3 or local fs, linear hash chaining. It also works with Mastra (agentic framework), and I am happy to expand its integrations via PRs.
Blog post with link to repo: https://systima.ai/blog/open-source-article-12-audit-logging
I'd value feedback, thoughts, and any critique.
Anyone can generate an alternative chain of sha256 hashes. perhaps you should consider timestamping, e.g. https://opentimestamps.org/ As for what the regulation says, I haven't looked but perhaps it doesn't require the system to be actually tamper-proof.