Australia's frontier AI rules ask for risk assessments and incident reports.

Australia is proposing new regulation that would require developers of frontier AI models to implement cybersecurity safeguards, conduct risk assessments and report incidents. The measures echo parts of the EU AI Act's high-risk system obligations.

The proposal sets out what developers must do: assess risks, secure systems, report problems. What it doesn't spell out is how a developer proves they did the assessment when they said they did, or that an incident report hasn't been quietly edited after the fact.

Risk assessments and incident logs are the kind of records regulators ask to see when something goes wrong. If those records live in editable files or internal databases, whoever controls them controls the story. A developer trying to show they followed the rules would need to prove the assessment happened before deployment and that incident reports match what was originally filed.

A digital witness would timestamp each risk assessment and incident report the moment it's created, proving when it was done and that the content hasn't changed. For a regulator, that's the difference between a claim and a checkable fact. For a developer facing a compliance review, it's proof they did what they said they did.