Z

Zero-Shot

• Category: Prompting & context
• What people say: Asking for a task without examples in the current prompt.
• What it actually means: Performing a task from instructions or task framing without including task-specific demonstrations in the immediate input.
• Common confusion: Zero-shot does not mean the model had no relevant pretraining, instruction tuning, tools, or retrieved context.
• Related terms: Few-Shot, Prompt Engineering, Transfer Learning

Zero Trust

• Category: Security & governance
• What it actually means: A security model that grants no implicit trust from network location or asset ownership and instead evaluates each access request against identity, device, resource, policy, and current context.
• Why it matters: AI tools and agents span local files, cloud services, models, and external content, so a trusted internal network is too broad a basis for authority.
• In practice: Authenticate every actor and workload, authorize each resource action, issue short-lived credentials, segment access, and continuously record and reevaluate policy-relevant signals.
• Common confusion: Zero trust does not mean trusting nothing or blocking all automation. It means making trust decisions explicit, scoped, and continuously verifiable.
• Learn it: Security, Secrets, and Audit
• Related terms: Least Privilege, Trust Boundary, Approval Gate, Audit Log
• Sources: NIST SP 800-207