Instruction provenance distinguishes trusted system policy, owner commands, approved skills, tool output, retrieved content, and untrusted page text. It can record source identity, version, signature, retrieval path, timestamp, transformation, and the permissions under which the instruction may act.
Provenance helps prevent external content from silently becoming authority. Agents and execution systems can reject, isolate, or request review when an instruction comes from a mutable or untrusted source that lacks permission to direct consequential actions.
ELI5
Instruction provenance is the history of where an AI instruction came from and why the system should trust it. It separates real rules from text that merely looks like a command.
For example, a project owner's approved instruction can carry authority, while a sentence found on a webpage should remain untrusted content. Recording the source helps the system avoid letting the webpage control private tools.
