{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,1]],"date-time":"2026-10-01T06:01:14Z","timestamp":1790834474036,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":28,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,1]],"date-time":"2026-10-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1790812800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Artif. Intell."],"abstract":"<jats:p>The auditability of large language model-based systems requires verifiable evidence without exposing the sensitive content of interactions. This article proposes a hash-chained audit-ledger framework to transform public LLM conversations into canonical off-chain units, generate cryptographic commitments using SHA-256 and HMAC-SHA-256, build a lightweight ledger with Merkle roots, and verify integrity against induced tampering. The study integrates three heterogeneous sources, LMSYS-Chat-1M, WildChat, and Chatbot Arena, and produces 3,971,887 auditable units. In the full-corpus HMAC-SHA-256 experiment, the 11,899.55 MiB normalized repository was represented by 1,473.44 MiB of hash-only audit records, 2.03 MiB of ledger block headers, and 380.52 MiB for the operational ledger plus membership structures required for record-level verification. Five induced tampering categories, Merkle and decision-hash integrity, hash-chain linkage integrity, block ordering integrity, membership completeness, and dataset-membership consistency, were detected without false acceptance; a separate clean-ledger baseline validated the untampered ledger with zero error signals. Load experiments showed near-linear growth of mean total pipeline time with respect to the number of audit records. Operational ledger-stage throughput increased across the intermediate workloads but declined at the largest evaluated load, while full record-set verification throughput remained comparatively stable up to 250,000 interactions before decreasing in the 500,000-interaction scenario. This contribution demonstrates that the traceability of decisions generated by LLM can be formulated as a measurable, private, and cryptographically verifiable experimental chain. The framework provides a documented numerical-audit basis for independent consistency assessment, regulatory compliance, and forensic analysis when ledger states are evaluated against preserved artifacts, trusted checkpoints, or externally anchored commitments.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/frai.2026.1929127","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,1]],"date-time":"2026-10-01T05:41:12Z","timestamp":1790833272000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Large-scale conversational data auditability via cryptographic commitments and hash-chained audit-ledger verification"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"9","author":[{"given":"Iv\u00e1n","family":"Ortiz-G\u00e1rces","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Escuela de Ingenier\u00eda en Ciberseguridad, Facultad de Ingenier\u00eda y Ciencias Aplicadas, Universidad de Las Am\u00e9ricas","place":["Quito, Ecuador"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Pablo","family":"Palacios","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Escuela de Inform\u00e1tica y Telecomunicaciones, Universidad Diego Portales","place":["Santiago, Chile"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Washington","family":"Loza-Herrera","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Research Group in Software Production Models (GrIMPSoft), Department of Computer Science, Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE","place":["Sangolqu\u00ed, Ecuador"]},{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos","place":["Madrid, Spain"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"William","family":"Villegas-Ch","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Escuela de Ingenier\u00eda en Ciberseguridad, Facultad de Ingenier\u00eda y Ciencias Aplicadas, Universidad de Las Am\u00e9ricas","place":["Quito, Ecuador"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,1]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"103930","DOI":"10.1016\/j.csi.2024.103930","article-title":"A privacy-preserving traceability system for self-sovereign identity-based inter-organizational business processes","volume":"92","author":"Abid","year":"2025","journal-title":"Comput. 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