Governance Framework

The top-level operating model — governance functions, agent lifecycle, risk classification, and enterprise integration.

The Agentic Governance Framework is the top-level operating model that everything else sits under. It defines five governance functions, an agent lifecycle, risk classification, and enterprise integration points.

Five Governance Functions

Adapted from NIST AI RMF for the agentic context:

Function	Purpose	AGF Mapping
Discover	Identify agentic systems, their capabilities, and their risk profile	Risk classification, agent inventory
Assess	Evaluate risks, threats, and governance requirements	Threat modeling, standards mapping
Govern	Establish policies, controls, and oversight mechanisms	Ring 2 (Governance), Policy as Code (#9)
Monitor	Observe system behavior, detect anomalies, measure compliance	Ring 3 + Observability, Event-Driven (#10)
Evolve	Improve governance based on operational experience	Self-Improving Cycles (#3), Trust Ladders (#11)

Agent Lifecycle

From deployment to retirement, with governance at every stage:

Design & Development — threat modeling, ring activation decisions, primitive selection
Evaluation & Assurance (#18) — pre-deployment testing, regression suites, adversarial evaluation
Deployment — initial trust level, governance configuration, monitoring baseline
Operation — runtime governance (Rings 0-2), continuous monitoring (Ring 3)
Evolution — trust calibration, configuration updates, capability expansion
Retirement — graceful decommission, evidence preservation, trust revocation

Risk Classification

Determines which rings activate and how intensely:

Risk Level	Ring Activation	Governance Intensity
Low	Ring 0 + minimal Ring 1	Near-zero overhead
Medium	Ring 0 + Ring 1 + adaptive Ring 2	1.5–3x Ring 0 alone
High	All four rings, mandatory gates	3–5x Ring 0 alone
Critical	All rings + enhanced Security Intelligence	5x+ Ring 0 alone

Enterprise Integration

AGF is designed to complement, not replace, existing enterprise systems:

IAM — agent identity integrates with organizational identity (SPIFFE, OAuth, OIDC)
SIEM/SOAR — agentic events flow to existing security monitoring
GRC platforms — governance evidence maps to control frameworks
CI/CD — Evaluation & Assurance (#18) integrates with deployment pipelines
Observability — OpenTelemetry compatibility ensures standard tooling

Maturity Model

Organizations grow governance capability over time:

Non-existent — agents deployed but no formal governance; no inventory, no classification, no governance artifacts. Most organizations with agents in production today.
Foundation — agent inventory maintained; risk-tier classification; Ring 0 + Ring 1 operational for high-risk agents; event capture; policy rules for critical domains.
Governed — full Ring 0 + Ring 1 + Ring 2 operational; Agentic Observability at correlation level; Trust Ladders calibrating; audit packages on demand.
Adaptive — Ring 3 (Learning) operational; self-improving cycles; predictive quality and security monitoring; governance overhead decreasing as the system matures.
Optimized — full framework across all agent types; continuous assurance; governance as competitive advantage; cross-organizational intelligence.

AGF's L1–L5 is a program-level scale. It is complementary to CSA ATF's per-deployment autonomy scale (Intern → Junior → Senior → Principal), which describes individual agent deployments within an organization. A program at L3 may run agents at varying ATF tiers.

For the complete governance framework specification, see the canonical source.