What records would an insurer ask for after an AI agent makes a costly mistake?
Expect a claims review to ask for five things: the instruction the agent was given, the steps and outputs it produced, the approvals recorded before consequential actions, the limits in force at the time, and a timeline tying them together. Review the receipt and actual deliverable before accepting a handover.
Scope: general information about the records a review typically requests, not insurance advice. Coverage questions belong to your broker and your policy wording.
Insurers underwrite stories they can check. After an agent's mistake costs money, the review reconstructs the event: what was the agent told to do, what did it actually do step by step, what did a human approve and when, and what controls were in place. Each answer that exists as a record shortens the review; each answer that exists as someone's memory lengthens it and weakens it.
The work record carries the first two answers. An AER-1 receipt (IETF Internet-draft-zambo-aer1-21) fixes each step's saved result at execution time, so the sequence the insurer reads is the sequence that ran, including the step where the mistake happened and the steps around it. The approval record carries the third: consequential steps show whether a human accepted them, held them, or never saw them, and a hold that was overridden is recorded as plainly as an acceptance.
The fourth answer is the control record: the spend or action limits in force, and any refusals the limits issued before the event. A limit that refused earlier calls is evidence the control environment was real, which matters to how a claim is read. Assemble the fifth answer, the timeline, from the other four rather than writing it from memory: instruction, steps, approvals, and limit events, in time order, each line pointing at its record.
Checklist: the claims-review record pack
1. The instruction or task brief given to the agent. 2. The step record for the job (receipts, saved results, producer labels). 3. The approval record for consequential steps (decider, decision, date). 4. The limits in force at the time, with any refusal events. 5. The timeline assembled from items 1 to 4. 6. The incident note: what happened, written within a day of discovery. 7. The remediation record: what changed afterwards, with dates. Keep the pack with the project's records, not in a separate claims folder nobody can find.
Worked example
The public record shape behind items 2 and 3: https://zambo.dev/handover/bd7e5325-33fd-4c5e-b029-76b781fa2f51 shows a five-step job with its acceptance state visible, the kind of object a reviewer can open without your systems or your narration. Records in this shape turn a claims interview into a document review.
Frequently asked questions
We had no records when the mistake happened. What do we do?
Assemble what exists (messages, files, invoices, platform histories), write the incident note now with dates marked as reconstructed, and start recording from today. A candid partial pack reads better than a polished reconstruction that claims more than it can show.
Does having records change whether a claim is covered?
Coverage is a policy question this page does not answer. What records change is the review itself: the facts get established from documents instead of recollections, which is the part you control.
Should we record even small agent jobs for insurance reasons?
Record the jobs whose failure would cost money or reach a customer. The recording cost per job is near zero once the connection is set up; the reconstruction cost after an incident is not.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai