Runtime Governance for AI Agents: Policies on Paths
AI agents -- systems that plan, reason, and act using large language models -- produce non-deterministic, path-dependent behavior that cannot be fully governed at design time, where with governed we mean striking the right balance between as high as possible successful task completion rate and the legal, data-breach, reputational and other costs associated with running agents. We argue that the execution path is the central object for effective runtime governance and formalize compliance policies as deterministic functions mapping agent identity, partial path, proposed next action, and organizational state to a policy violation probability. We show that prompt-level instructions (and "sys...
| Authors | Maurits Kaptein, Vassilis-Javed Khan, Andriy Podstavnychy |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 March 2026 |
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