Glossary
What do Inhold's terms mean?
Inhold's docs use a small set of terms: principal, purpose, label, bundle, audit row, anchor, evidence pack, correction and skill. Each is defined here.
Inhold is being built. No customers yet. Repo goes public 9 Nov 2026.
- Principal
- Anyone Inhold makes a decision about: an agent or a person, with a type and an id. Agents and people never share an id.
- Purpose
- The job a call is for, such as prior_auth or billing. Every read and write runs under exactly one. On MCP it is fixed when the session starts, so a model cannot change it in a tool call.
- Label
- What kind of data an item holds: PHI, PII, internal or public. Labels come from the purpose's defaults, the tagger and the caller. A caller can add labels but never remove one.
- Policy bundle
- The customer's JSON file that names each principal, the purposes it may use, and which labels each purpose may read, write and delete. Anything it does not allow is denied.
- Policy decision
- Allow or deny for one call, with a reason. Each decision writes one audit row, in the same transaction as the data it guards.
- Audit row
- The record of one decision: who, what, which purpose, which labels, allowed or denied, the reason, the policy hash and the previous row's hash. Rows are never updated or deleted.
- Chain head
- The hash of the newest audit row. Because each row includes the hash before it, the head commits to the whole history.
- Anchor
- A signed copy of the chain head, kept outside the database. It catches a database admin who rewrites every row and recomputes the hashes.
- Evidence pack
- A zip a reviewer exports: the active policy, the audit rows, the chain check, the anchors, the control map and the answers, with a SHA-256 manifest.
- Correction
- A person's edit to an agent's output, stored with a diff. Only people write corrections.
- Skill
- A reusable instruction drawn from corrections. It stays a draft until a named approver approves it, and agents read only approved skills.
- Tagger
- The local code that labels data at write time: patterns for MRN, date of birth, ICD-10, NPI, member id, SSN, email and phone, plus an optional local name model. It makes no network call.
- Subject
- The person an item is about. A write with a subject gets the purpose's subject labels, so it is PHI or PII whatever the tagger finds.
- Tenant
- One end customer's install. Each tenant has its own store, its own chain and its own policy.
- Deny by default
- If the bundle does not say a principal may do something under a purpose, Inhold refuses it and logs the refusal.