What records should I keep if a client says AI work infringed their rights?
Keep the provenance set for every deliverable: the job record with its sources and their check states, the draft lineage showing how the output developed, your licences and permissions for any third-party material, and the delivery record with the client's acceptance. Review the receipt and actual deliverable before accepting a handover.
Scope: general information about record-keeping, not legal advice. A record shows what the output drew on and how it developed; it does not by itself prove ownership, originality, or non-infringement, which are legal questions for your lawyer.
Rights claims about AI-assisted work turn on provenance questions: what did the output draw on, was that material used within its rights, and how did the deliverable develop from its inputs. Those are record questions before they are legal ones, and they are answerable only if the records were kept as a matter of routine, because a claim is the worst moment to start reconstructing a lineage.
The job record carries the core: sources consulted with their states, the steps that transformed them, and the deliverable that resulted. The draft lineage, the writer's version trail this file treats in the Cluster 3 pages, shows development over time, which is often the most persuasive material in the room: work that visibly grew through drafts reads differently from work that appeared fully formed. Licences and permissions sit alongside, filed per job rather than in a general folder, because a licence that cannot be matched to the deliverable it covers is a rumour.
On the day a claim is mentioned, the duty changes from keeping to preserving: freeze the set, export it under your control, and stop editing anything in it, including innocent tidy-ups. Then the records go to your lawyer as the factual substrate, while the legal questions, ownership, originality, infringement itself, stay where this page's scope line puts them.
Checklist: the provenance set
Per deliverable: 1. Job record: steps, sources with states, tools used. 2. Draft lineage: versions in order, with the prompts or briefs that drove material changes. 3. Rights file: licences, permissions, and terms for every third-party input, matched to the job. 4. Delivery record: the handover and the client's acceptance. 5. Correspondence: the brief and any client-supplied material, with its own provenance noted. On a claim: freeze, export, preserve, hand the set to counsel, and log every subsequent step in the incident record.
Worked example
The source-state foundation is visible on a live record: https://zambo.dev/handover/48479a33-d996-4419-a9c8-d1b9a55e62b9 carries its sources as {1 resolved, 1 not_resolved, 1 not_checked}. In a rights conversation, that discipline, knowing exactly which sources were actually consulted and which were not, is the difference between answering from evidence and answering from memory.
Frequently asked questions
Does a complete record set defeat an infringement claim?
No, and this page does not claim it does. The set establishes the facts of provenance, what was drawn on and how the work developed. Whether those facts amount to infringement is a legal determination. What the set defeats is the fog in which weak claims thrive and strong defences die.
The claim is about the client's own material they supplied. Do the records still matter?
They matter most there: the correspondence and job record show what the client supplied, when, and how it was used, which is frequently the entire dispute. Client-supplied inputs belong in the provenance set with the same care as third-party ones.
How long should provenance sets be kept?
At least as long as the deliverable can generate claims: the contract's window plus the relevant limitation periods your lawyer names. Storage is cheap; the set is small; the asymmetry argues for keeping it.
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