Production Prompt and Configuration Drift Audit

Audit whether an AI system is running the exact prompt and configuration state that its owners approved. Include system and developer prompts, templates, policies, model and version, retrieval settings, tool definitions, decoding controls, feature flags, and environment-specific overrides.

Provide:
- Approved versions, hashes, manifests, release records, and intended environment matrix: [Approved prompt and configuration baseline]
- Deployed artifacts, resolved configuration, environment values, gateway settings, and runtime version identifiers: [Deployed artifacts and environment inventory]
- Pull requests, tickets, approvals, emergency changes, deployment records, and rollback history: [Change deployment and approval records]
- Timestamped traces, rendered prompts, model routes, tool schemas, retrieval settings, outputs, and incidents: [Runtime traces and behavior evidence]
- Evaluation results, regression thresholds, release claims, and accepted limitations: [Evaluation results and acceptance criteria]
- Recovery options, production constraints, and prompt, service, security, and release owners: [Rollback constraints and owners]

Do not reconstruct a secret or omitted prompt from behavior alone. Do not claim an environment or provider was inspected unless its artifacts are supplied. Treat version labels without content hashes or resolved configuration evidence as weak identifiers. Separate deployed drift from expected environment variation and from behavior drift with no proven configuration change.

Audit procedure:

1. Establish the approved baseline.
   Create a component inventory with exact identifiers, content hashes where supplied, owning role, approved environment, dependency versions, and acceptance evidence. Flag mutable aliases, undocumented defaults, and missing baselines.

2. Resolve the effective production state.
   Map the artifacts and configuration actually used for representative runtime records. Include template rendering, injected policies, gateway transformations, model routing, tool schemas, retrieval settings, feature flags, and post-processing.

3. Compare baseline to effective state.
   Classify differences as Approved release, Expected environment variance, Emergency authorized change, Unauthorized drift, Stale deployment, Partial rollout, Mutable dependency change, or Not assessable.

4. Reconstruct material drift.
   For each material difference, identify first evidence, likely change path, affected environments and traffic, duration, accountable owner, observed behavior, and whether the drift invalidates prior evaluation evidence.

5. Assess decision impact.
   Determine whether the drift changes safety boundaries, tool authority, data handling, answer contract, retrieval behavior, quality claims, cost or latency assumptions, or regulatory/contractual commitments. Do not infer causation from temporal correlation without supporting evidence.

6. Select a disposition per drift item.
   Choose Roll back to approved baseline, Adopt through change control, Restrict affected traffic, Revalidate before decision, or Monitor as accepted variance. State smallest safe action, owner, approval, dependencies, and rollback trigger.

7. Design recurrence controls.
   Define immutable artifact identifiers, resolved-config capture, deployment attestation, runtime sampling, hash comparison, alert thresholds, emergency-change expiry, and evaluation invalidation rules proportionate to the risk.

If an approved baseline, component hash, deployment record, or owner decision is missing or conflicts with another source, request the blocking evidence and keep the affected drift status Unknown. Do not infer the approved configuration from the currently running state, and do not close the audit while a material baseline conflict remains unresolved.

Required deliverable:

# Production Prompt and Configuration Drift Audit

## Approved Baseline Inventory
| Component | Approved identifier/hash | Environment | Owner | Approval evidence | Evaluation evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## Effective Production Inventory
| Component | Observed identifier/config | Evidence source | Traffic/window | Confidence | Missing proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## Drift Register
| Difference | Classification | First evidence | Scope | Behavior/claim impact | Prior evaluation still valid? | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## Disposition Plan
| Priority | Drift item | Decision | Smallest safe action | Approval | Verification | Rollback trigger |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## Recurrence Controls
| Control | Drift detected | Evidence retained | Threshold | Owner | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## Audit Conclusion
- Production state matches approval: Yes / Partially / No / Not assessable
- Release claims invalidated or narrowed:
- Immediate restrictions:
- Unresolved evidence:
- Next owner decision:

Complete the audit only when every material production component is reconciled to an approved state or a named disposition, and the release owner can tell which evaluation claims remain valid.