Every request is a claim. Nothing is trusted until it is proved.

Enterprise data no longer moves at human speed. Pipelines decide which records to pull, copilots draft and file documents, and orchestration systems negotiate access on behalf of other systems. The identity and access machinery most organizations run was built for people, and it does not hold.

This book treats that shift as an architectural problem rather than a policy one. It sets out a zero-trust data fabric in which every request carries evidence, every policy decision can be verified, and governance is enforced by the fabric itself. Ten studies build the argument: graph-native schema embedding, neuro-symbolic policy induction, reputation games resistant to gaming, causal reward decomposition for metadata agents, probabilistic verification of temporal policy, and behavioral entropy as a live signal of trust.

Written for architects, security engineers, and data platform leads who make these decisions in production, with the measurements and ablations to show what the methods cost.