Large-scale conversational data auditability via cryptographic commitments and hash-chained audit-ledger verification

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.