Glossary
Quantlix terms in plain English
Use this page as the canonical vocabulary for product docs, support answers, and the Quantlix Assistant.
Deployment
A production-facing model endpoint or logical model binding that Quantlix runs through its runtime control plane.
Inference target
The concrete backend behind a deployment. Workflow model and agent nodes execute through provider-backed inference targets.
Provider model
A model exposed by an external provider such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Groq, Together, Voyage AI, or similar.
Workflow
A versioned graph of nodes that can fetch data, transform payloads, redact text, call tools, run retrieval, and invoke models.
Node
One step in a workflow, such as mcp_input, redact_text, model, agent, function, retrieval, tool_call, router, condition, approval, or output.
Agent
A workflow node that lets a provider-backed chat model call configured functions through a bounded native tool-calling loop.
Function
A deterministic workflow node or agent tool that executes HTTP, webhook, or internal logic without arbitrary local code execution.
MCP input
A workflow node that connects to an MCP server and normalizes tool or resource output into text, raw, items_count, and has_text.
Policy
A runtime rule that decides whether to allow, block, warn, redact, or budget-gate a request.
Contract
A schema or feature expectation for request or response shape. Contracts make AI payloads predictable.
Enforcement event
An audit record that captures what policy or contract decision happened for a request.
Trace
A request timeline showing steps, latency, errors, retrieval, citations, evals, and policy decisions.
Eval
A saved quality check for AI outputs, similar to a test suite for prompts, retrieval, or model changes.
Retrieval / RAG
Looking up your own documents or chunks so model responses can be grounded in private knowledge.
Knowledge base
A configured collection of sources, chunks, embeddings, and vector indexes used for retrieval.
Redaction
Replacing sensitive text such as emails, phone numbers, IDs, or custom regex matches before provider inference.
Audit export
A downloadable evidence package showing requests, enforcement events, redaction summaries, and model payload visibility.
AI Runtime Control Plane
The runtime layer between applications and model providers that deploys, controls, observes, and evaluates production AI — enforcing policy before inference and recording evidence per request. Quantlix's product category.
Runtime evidence
Tamper-evident, time-stamped records that controls actually fired on live AI traffic — policy decisions, redaction events, approvals, provider attribution — as opposed to policy documents, which state intent but prove nothing.
Evidence vs. attestation
Quantlix's honesty model: an obligation is runtime-evidenced only when a stored field backs it; obligations needing a human judgment (an access review, an organizational process) are attestations, recorded with owner and review date. Evidence is produced by the platform; verdicts are rendered by auditors and counsel — never by Quantlix.
Audit bundle
A manifest-led evidence package (PDF, CSV, or JSON) composed on demand: policy configuration, enforcement records, redaction evidence, provider activity, change history, register extract, attestations, and coverage — stamped with the catalogue and policy versions in force, and independently verifiable with a bundled standalone script.
Criterion mapping (SOC 2)
The section of a SOC 2-scoped audit bundle that maps each Trust Services Criterion to its honesty tag, the bundle sections backing it, and the evidence rows included — the artifact a CPA firm's workpapers cite. Quantlix evidences; only a licensed CPA firm attests.
Obligations map
The in-product view showing which obligations (EU AI Act or SOC 2 TSC) carry live runtime evidence with counters and permalinks, which carry attestations with owners and review dates, and which are out of scope — a dashboard where every status is backed by stored data.
Hash-chained trace store
A per-tenant append-only ledger where each record carries the SHA-256 digest of the previous one, so undetected alteration breaks the chain; segment Merkle roots anchor to the public Sigstore Rekor transparency log for verification without trusting Quantlix.
External Reviewer role
A scoped, time-boxed, read-only access role for auditors and legal reviewers, enforced by a server-side deny-list — never API keys, provider secrets, or billing — with every access audit-logged from entry to expiry.
Assistant guidance
When answering users, prefer these stable terms. If a user says “quality checks,” explain that Quantlix calls them evals. If a user says “document lookup,” explain retrieval or RAG. If a user says “safety rules,” explain policies, contracts, and enforcement events.