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World desk6 min

How to Audit API Calls Made by AI Agents and Trace Them to a User

A reliable AI-agent audit trail links a distinct agent identity, any delegated user authority, a trace of the full run, and corroborating identity-provider and target-service records.
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To trace an AI agent’s API call to a person, record the agent’s identity separately from the user’s, capture whether the action used delegated user authority or the agent’s own service authority, and connect the agent run to identity-provider and target-service audit records. A trace can show the sequence of attempted work; it is not, by itself, proof of which data-plane action a service committed.

What an audit record needs to answer

A useful audit trail should let an operator connect four things: who or what initiated the action, whose authority the agent used, what calls and downstream steps occurred, and which independent records corroborate the result. Treat the agent and the human as separate principals. AWS warns that reusing a human IAM role for an agent makes the agent’s actions indistinguishable from the person’s in audit logs (AWS guidance on separating agent and human permissions).

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  • Agent identity: a stable identifier for the agent or workload that made the call.
  • User or subject identity: the person on whose behalf the agent acted, if any. Leave this absent rather than inventing a user for autonomous work.
  • Authority mode: whether the action was delegated by a user or performed under the agent’s own service identity.
  • Request context: target service and resource, outcome, and a trace or correlation identifier that ties related events together.

These identities answer different questions: the agent field identifies the software actor; the user field identifies the person whose authority was delegated. A client-supplied user_id is only an assertion until a trusted gateway or ingestion boundary binds it to authenticated identity and authorization context.

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Build an end-to-end audit trail

  1. Give the agent its own authenticated identity. Where supported, assign a distinct workload identity to each agent rather than sharing a human credential. Use a consented delegated OAuth or provider-supported token-exchange flow when a user authorizes an action; use an agent or service identity for autonomous work. Keep scopes narrow and make consent and revocation manageable. Google documents 3-legged OAuth for user-delegated access and 2-legged OAuth for machine-to-machine access; AWS describes agent-specific workload tokens that can retain user context in claims (Google Cloud Agent Identity overview; AWS guidance).
  2. Create a trace for the complete run. Use a root span for the agent run and child spans for model calls, tool invocations, API requests, responses, and relevant downstream work. Capture timing, status, and error details, then propagate trace or correlation IDs across services and agent-to-agent messages. OpenTelemetry can provide interoperable instrumentation and export, but it does not authenticate a user or make an identity attribute trustworthy (Amazon OpenSearch AI observability).
  3. Bind identity attributes to authenticated context. Record agent and user identifiers as structured attributes or claims where appropriate, and establish their relationship at a trusted gateway, token-validation, or telemetry-ingestion boundary. Do not treat an unverified trace field as proof that a user authorized a call. Microsoft Agent 365 documents a check that the agent ID in the span and URL matches the calling application ID in the authenticated token; mismatches are rejected (Microsoft Agent 365 observability concepts).
  4. Enable identity-provider and target-service audit records. Inspect identity-provider audit and sign-in events for the principal and authority context. Enable the target service’s relevant data-plane audit events as well as management-plane records when needed. A trace may record an attempted request, while the service’s own audit event helps establish what action was committed.
  5. Correlate the evidence. Use the shared trace or correlation ID where the relevant systems record it. Where they do not, retain enough authenticated context—such as agent identity, user subject, resource, and time—to investigate the corresponding events without treating a matching username alone as proof.
  6. Protect the telemetry. Avoid putting bearer tokens, secrets, or unnecessary raw personal data in span attributes. Set retention, redaction, and operator-access policies according to the sensitivity of prompts and tool arguments and applicable organizational requirements; there is no universal retention period established by the cited provider documentation.

What the provider-specific records can show

System Useful evidence and capabilities Important qualification
OpenAI agent traces OpenAI describes sessions containing turns and traces containing steps and spans associated with a root agent or subagents. Tool spans can include call arguments and results when available, along with outcome or error details (OpenAI tracing documentation). Trace export must be enabled for the organization, and the API key needs api.traces.read or the broader api.agents.read permission. Session trace export returns paginated OTLP JSON; it is a point-in-time retrieval, not automatic delivery of future traces. A trace may not be ready as soon as the agent response is returned.
Microsoft Entra Agent ID and Agent 365 Entra agent audit schema includes agentType fields for initiator, performer, and target, with values including agenticApp, agenticAppInstance, and agentIDuser. blueprintId can connect an instance to its blueprint. Agent sign-in events are available in the admin center and Microsoft Graph (Microsoft Entra Agent ID logs). Agent sign-ins may appear in any of four sign-in log types. The documented Graph filter uses the /beta endpoint, so verify current API and schema support before relying on it in production. Agent 365 observability uses a span tree for a run; its documented OBO path uses a delegated scope, while S2S uses an app role. Consent and permissions affect telemetry ingestion (Microsoft Agent 365 observability concepts).
Google Cloud Agent Identity Google describes distinct agent identities and audit logging that can show both the agent and user when an agent acts for a user. Its overview describes unique SPIFFE identities and X.509 certificates for the service (Google Cloud Agent Identity overview). The overview specifies 24-hour certificate validity with automatic renewal for Google Cloud Agent Identity; this is a product-specific detail, not a general certificate lifetime.
AWS identity and CloudTrail AWS describes agent-specific workload tokens carrying user-context claims, token-vault scoping per agent and user, and CloudTrail advanced event selectors for capturing data events. Its guidance also recommends correlation IDs in agent-to-agent messages; CloudTrail logs can be delivered to S3 and queried with Athena (AWS guidance). Enable the data events needed for the services the agent invokes; management events alone may not provide the necessary detail.
OpenTelemetry and OpenSearch OpenSearch AI observability describes hierarchical traces for orchestration, LLM calls, tool use, and retrieval, and identifies GenAI semantic attributes such as gen_ai.system, gen_ai.request.model, and gen_ai.usage.input_tokens (Amazon OpenSearch AI observability). Telemetry conventions help organize spans; they do not grant authorization or independently prove that a recorded identity is genuine.

Test whether attribution survives real failures

Before relying on the trail operationally, exercise cases that produce different identity and outcome records:

  • Delegated user call: confirm that the trace identifies both the agent and user subject, and that the token or provider audit event reflects delegated authority.
  • Autonomous call: confirm that the agent appears as the actor and no user is falsely attributed.
  • Authorization failure: check that the denied request, principal, requested resource, and error can be correlated across available records.
  • Downstream failure: distinguish an agent’s attempted request from a service action that succeeded, failed, or was never reached.

For each case, compare the trace with identity-provider, gateway (if used), and target-service records. Confirm that agent, user context, resource, outcome, and correlation information agree where those systems expose the fields. This is an implementation validation procedure, not a guarantee that ordinary traces are tamper-proof or complete.

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Choose tools by evidence coverage, not by trace appearance

There is no universal cross-provider audit schema or single trace view that contains the entire record. When evaluating an implementation, check whether it preserves distinct agent and user identities, represents delegated and autonomous authority differently, covers the run through downstream calls and errors, and can be corroborated by identity-provider and data-plane events. Also verify identity binding, export and query options, retention and access controls, and compatibility with the organization’s OpenTelemetry and log pipelines. The provider documentation describes different capabilities and constraints; it does not establish a universal winner.

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