AI governance, term by term.
The vocabulary of this field defined in plain sentences. Every definition stands on its own, whether you write policy, review security, or want to know what a tool call is.
- AI governance
- AI governance is the practice of deciding what AI tools and agents may do, enforcing those rules while the AI acts, and keeping a record of what happened. How Verillian does it
- Security as control
- Security as control is the practice of deciding what an AI may do before it acts, rather than detecting and reporting what it did afterwards. How Verillian decides
- Shadow AI
- Shadow AI is AI use that happens outside an organization's approved tools and accounts, through personal logins and unvetted apps, where no policy applies and no record is kept. Control it, don't just find it
- Audit trail
- An audit trail is a chronological record of the actions taken in a system, kept so that what happened can be reconstructed and checked later. The whole-turn record
- Tamper-evident
- Tamper-evident means a record is written so that any later change to it becomes visible, which lets the record be checked instead of trusted. Why it counts as evidence
- Hash chain
- A hash chain links records by giving each entry a cryptographic fingerprint of the one before it, so a change to an entry's signed fields is detectable. The chain, explained
- Endpoint
- An endpoint is a device an organization manages, such as a laptop or workstation, and it is where AI use actually happens. Why the device is the place
- Agent
- An agent is an AI system that takes actions on its own, reading files, running commands, and calling tools in pursuit of a goal rather than just answering a question. Governing agents
- Tool call
- A tool call is the moment an AI stops talking and does something, invoking a capability like running a command or writing to a system, and it is the unit an AI policy rules on. Ruling on tool calls
- MCP
- MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to outside tools and data sources, such as a CRM or a code repository. MCP under policy
- Redaction
- Redaction replaces sensitive values in a text, such as a name or a card number, with placeholders before that text is shown or sent anywhere. Redaction, shown in the record
- AI kill switch
- An AI kill switch is an administrator action that denies every AI connection through the checkpoint, for the moments when something needs to stop before it is understood. How stopping works
- Checkpoint
- The checkpoint is the part of Verillian that runs on each device, between the AI tool and its provider, applying declared policy to the requests and tool calls that reach a provider. The layer end to end
- Admin server
- The admin server is the management server a Verillian customer runs on their own infrastructure, never on Verillian's. It distributes signed policy, tracks enrolled devices, and stores the sealed record alongside the searchable metadata. Where your data lives
See Verillian on a real device.
