Governance

Agentic systems need more than intelligence. They need boundaries. AWP lets a manifest declare them and requires a governance-profile runtime to enforce them.

At a glance

Each area is declared in the manifest; the excerpts below are shortened.

Identity & ownership

Every workflow names the team accountable for it.

metadata:
  name: invoice-processing
  version: 1.2.0
  owner:
    team: finance-ai
    contact: [email protected]

Data classification

Inputs and outputs carry a class; external transfer can be denied.

dataPolicy:
  classification: confidential
  restrictions:
    externalTransfer: deny

Data residency

Restrict where data is processed and by which providers. Undeterminable regions fail closed.

dataPolicy:
  residency:
    allowed: [EU]
  processing:
    forbiddenProviders:
      - public-cloud-us

Model governance

Only approved providers and models, checked before the run starts.

modelPolicy:
  allowedProviders: [azure-openai, ollama]
  requirements:
    approvalStatus: approved
    encryption: true

Tool governance

Permissions per action, with default deny and network limits.

permissions:
  default: deny
  tools:
    github.read:
      allow: true
    production.deploy:
      allow: false

Budgets & resources

Cost, steps, time, tokens, tool calls, retries and concurrency are bounded.

budget:
  maxCostUsd: 5.00
  maxSteps: 50
  maxDuration: 30m
  resources:
    maxToolCalls: 100

Risk levels

A possible governance model, not a regulatory classification.

metadata:
  risk:
    level: high
    category: [security, financial]

Environments

The same workflow runs with different autonomy per environment.

environments:
  development:
    autonomy: unrestricted
  production:
    autonomy: approval-required

Separation of duties

Whoever initiates an action cannot approve it.

approval:
  separationOfDuties:
    enabled: true
    rules:
      - actorCannotApproveOwnAction: true