# System card

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/system-card

> A system card extends the model card concept to cover an entire AI system — the model plus prompts, tools, retrieval, guardrails, and intended deployment context.

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A system card extends the model card concept to cover an entire AI system — the model plus prompts, tools, retrieval, guardrails, and intended deployment context.

Where a model card documents a single model, a system card documents the whole AI feature: which model is used at which step, what tools it can call, what RAG sources feed it, what guardrails sit around it, and what use cases are in/out of scope. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all publish system cards for major launches (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini AI Overviews). For internal production teams, maintaining a one-page system card per AI feature is best practice for safety review, on-call debugging, and audit. It's also the document you hand to a security or legal reviewer.

## When to use

- Any production AI feature.
- Safety / legal / compliance reviews.
- Operations runbooks for AI features.

## Common mistakes

- Conflating with the model card — system cards cover the whole pipeline.
- Letting the system card drift out of sync with the deployed system.

## Related terms

- [model-card](https://promtable.com/glossary/model-card)
- [evals](https://promtable.com/glossary/evals)
- [guardrails](https://promtable.com/glossary/guardrails)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/system-card
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