What does an agent governance architecture look like?

Answer

A complete agent governance architecture has five layers:

1. Gateway — authenticates, routes, and applies org-level policies.
2. Deploy engine — agent registration, lifecycle management, execution tracking, dependency mapping.
3. Govern engine — runtime policy enforcement, kill switches, HITL gates, anomaly detection, conditional access, communication logging.
4. Comply engine — compliance checking, bias detection, drift monitoring, content safety, risk scoring, artifact generation, audit trail.
5. Shared infrastructure — event bus, feature flags, encryption, multi-tenant isolation. Every agent action passes through the gateway and gets checked against the govern and comply engines before execution.