ISO/IEC 42001, published in 2023, defines an AI management system that accredited bodies certify against. Clause 7.5 requires documented information to be controlled, protected, and retained, so that policies, procedures, and records stay available and intact for audit. Clause 9 requires monitoring, measurement, internal audit, and management review, each of which produces records the certifier examines.
A certification audit is not looking for documents. It is looking for evidence of systematic governance, and the difference between the two is whether the record was created as the work happened, or assembled the week before the audit.
The documented information sits inside the organization's management system. A certifier is asked to accept that it was produced contemporaneously and kept unaltered, and the system's own controls are the assurance. But a record store the organization controls cannot, by itself, prove that a record was not written after the fact or edited later. That is exactly the doubt a rigorous audit probes.
Each record is hash-chained, and the head of the chain is written as a leaf into a public transparency log at log.markovianprotocol.com, an append-only log outside the organization's control. Seven independent witnesses, including Geomys and Google's transparency.dev witnesses, cosign the log checkpoint hourly, and checkpoints are anchored to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps. A certifier recomputes the chain from the records, which needs nobody, and checks inclusion of the head in the witnessed log from public endpoints. Once the checkpoint is anchored to Bitcoin, the record is checkable against the Bitcoin blockchain, independent of Markovian.
Editing or backdating a record breaks the chain. This does not build or run your management system, it makes the documented information the standard already requires provably contemporaneous, and checkable without trusting the organization.
ISO/IEC 42001 is a management system standard certified by accredited bodies. Markovian is not a certification, not the management system, and this is not legal advice. What Markovian provides is narrow: it makes the documented information the standard requires provably contemporaneous and independently verifiable, so a certifier can see governance that was recorded as it happened.