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Palimem Docsspec v1.7.0

Governance

Palimem is built for teams that need to know what the agent knew, when, and why. This guide covers retention, audit export, PII scanning, and legal hold.

Retention policy

Section titled “Retention policy”

Retention policies evict low-salience records after a configurable window. Eviction appends a retention retract event to the WAL — it does not delete WAL history.

Retention is configured per namespace via the operator CLI or environment variable:

Terminal window
# Example: retain session-scope episodes for 30 days
MEMORY_SERVICE_RETENTION_SESSION_DAYS=30
Variable Scope Default Purpose
MEMORY_SERVICE_RETENTION_SESSION_DAYS session 90 Days to retain session episodes
MEMORY_SERVICE_RETENTION_BELIEF_DAYS all 365 Days to retain unconfirmed beliefs
MEMORY_SERVICE_RETENTION_NOTE_DAYS all 30 Days to retain low-salience notes

Records exempt from retention eviction:

  • fact records (high-confidence, operator-accepted)
  • preference records
  • Records under legal_hold: true
Section titled “Legal hold”

Mark a subject as protected from memory_forget and retention eviction:

{
  "tool": "memory_remember",
  "scope": "repository",
  "namespace": "my-project",
  "topic": "compliance",
  "field": "gdpr_consent_version",
  "memory_type": "fact",
  "value": "2.1",
  "legal_hold": true
}

When legal_hold: true, any subsequent memory_forget call for this subject returns:

{ "error": { "code": "legal_hold" } }

Release the hold by writing a new value with legal_hold: false (requires elevated operator authorization in production deployments).

Audit export

Section titled “Audit export”

memory_audit_export produces a compliance-ready structured export of the full WAL:

{
  "tool": "memory_audit_export",
  "scope": "repository",
  "namespace": "my-project",
  "from": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "to": "2026-06-30T23:59:59Z",
  "format": "jsonl"
}

The export includes:

  • Every WAL event with full provenance
  • source, tool, actor, request_id for each write
  • Legal hold flags and timestamps
  • Supersession chain (which event superseded which)

Store audit exports according to your organization’s retention schedule.

PII pre-store scanning

Section titled “PII pre-store scanning”

When enabled, Palimem runs a PII scan on the serialized value before WAL append in memory_remember. This is a write-path hook, not a separate MCP tool.

Enable per namespace:

Terminal window
MEMORY_SERVICE_PII_SCAN_ENABLED=1
MEMORY_SERVICE_PII_SCAN_NAMESPACE=my-project

Scan results are surfaced through memory_status under profile_engine.pii_scan. Rejected writes return:

{ "error": { "code": "pii_detected", "detail": "..." } }

Temporal queries for audits

Section titled “Temporal queries for audits”

Use memory_query_temporal to reconstruct the belief trajectory of a subject for a compliance audit:

{
  "tool": "memory_query_temporal",
  "scope": "repository",
  "namespace": "my-project",
  "topic": "auth",
  "field": "provider"
}

This returns the ordered sequence of all values for auth.provider from creation to now, including retraction events.

Point-in-time recall

Section titled “Point-in-time recall”

Use as_of on memory_get to answer “what did the agent believe on this date?”:

{
  "tool": "memory_get",
  "scope": "repository",
  "namespace": "my-project",
  "topic": "auth",
  "field": "provider",
  "memory_type": "fact",
  "as_of": "2026-03-01T00:00:00Z"
}

Governance checklist

Section titled “Governance checklist”
Control How to configure
Retain session data ≤ 90 days MEMORY_SERVICE_RETENTION_SESSION_DAYS=90
Protect compliance records Write with legal_hold: true
Export WAL for compliance memory_audit_export monthly
Scan writes for PII MEMORY_SERVICE_PII_SCAN_ENABLED=1
Audit point-in-time belief memory_query_temporal per subject

Non-goals for v1.7.0

Section titled “Non-goals for v1.7.0”
  • Multi-tenant fleet SaaS with centralized governance — v1 is local-first, single-tenant
  • Automated PII remediation — manual review required after scan detection
  • RBAC for namespace access — operator-level config only

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”