Introducing B-TAP: Because Your AI Infrastructure Hasn’t Attributed Its Fair Share
ken_walger·
Observability systems watch the supervisors, and other systems watch the observability systems. We’re pleased to introduce the Bureau of Token Attribution and Provenance , or B-TAP , the first bureau of The Vernholt Secretariat and the one some of you will insist on calling the Token IRS no matter how many times we correct you. Our mandate is voluntary but sweeping: to harmonize the reporting of token costs across every model, agent, retrieval pipeline, and suspiciously autonomous llama, everywhere, forever. Context Tax is assessed when information must be carried through active model context. Every instruction, retrieved document, conversation turn, agent output, and piece of supporting material occupies finite context and incurs processing cost.