BlackLake (cloud) vs audit logging
An audit log can’t deny a call.
AI control and analytics can.
SIEM-as-AI-audit tells you what happened. AI control and analytics decides whether it should happen — before the spend, before the API hit, before the receipt. The audit log is downstream of the decision, not a substitute for it.
Feature comparison
AI control & analytics vs SIEM-as-AI-audit
A complete record after the fact is different from a control before the call.
| Feature | BlackLake | Audit logging / SIEM |
|---|---|---|
| Records the AI action after it happened | Yes — and the decision, the policy, the approver, the cost | Yes — that's the whole product |
| Decides whether the action is allowed before it runs | Yes — declarative policies at govern() time | No — read-only after the fact |
| Routes high-risk actions to a human approver | Yes — console, email magic-link, mobile push | No |
| Caps spend before the LLM call leaves the network | Yes — budgets deny pre-spend at govern() time | No — alerts only |
| Receipt is HMAC-signed and independently verifiable | Yes — paste into /verify, read the chain | No — log entries are not signed individually |
| Cost cryptographically bound to the decision | Yes — v2 decision tokens | No |
| Policy simulation against historical traffic | Yes — with dollar-impact estimates | No |
| Captures the AI Actor identity, not just the API caller | Yes — capture-path attribution links the actor to the action | Sometimes — depends on what the caller logs |
| Reconciles cloud audit events against governed actions | Yes — unmatched mutations surface as ungoverned | Out of scope |
| Stream to BigQuery / SIEM / finance | Yes — signed NDJSON + CSV exports | Yes — that's the SIEM's job |
Why this matters
The decision is the artifact. The log is downstream.
SIEMs are write-only — they receive events from systems that already decided to do something. That works for human-driven actions because identity providers and OS audit are upstream of the SIEM and they are the things that say yes or no. There is no equivalent control plane upstream of an AI Actor calling a tool, unless you build one.
That upstream control plane is what BlackLake provides. The signed receipt that flows downstream into a SIEM is the artifact the control plane produced — not a substitute for the decision itself. BlackLake exports its ledger into your SIEM precisely because the SIEM is still the right place to correlate AI events with the rest of the company.
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