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AI Agent Governance Checklist

Is your AI agent production-ready? Use this checklist to audit your agent's governance posture.

Risk Classification

  • [ ] Every action type has an assigned risk level (low/medium/high/critical)
  • [ ] Destructive actions (delete, drop, transfer) are classified as critical
  • [ ] Read-only actions are classified as low risk
  • [ ] Bulk operations have risk escalation based on volume

Access Control

  • [ ] Actions are gated by approval level (auto/approve/block)
  • [ ] Critical actions require human approval before execution
  • [ ] Truly dangerous actions are hard-blocked (no override possible)
  • [ ] Approval decisions are logged with approver identity

Audit Trail

  • [ ] Every action is logged with timestamp, type, target, and params
  • [ ] Every decision (allow/block) is logged with the matched rule
  • [ ] Approval outcomes are logged (who approved, when)
  • [ ] Audit logs are immutable (append-only)
  • [ ] Logs can be exported for compliance review (JSONL, CSV)

Policy Management

  • [ ] Policies are declarative (YAML/JSON, not hardcoded)
  • [ ] Policies can be hot-reloaded without restarting the agent
  • [ ] Policy changes are version-controlled
  • [ ] Policies support conditions (time-based, parameter-based)

Framework Coverage

  • [ ] Governance applies to ALL tools the agent uses, not just some
  • [ ] Multiple AI providers/frameworks are covered by one policy
  • [ ] Custom tools/adapters are easy to integrate

Error Handling

  • [ ] Blocked actions fail safely (no partial execution)
  • [ ] Failed approvals don't leave the system in an inconsistent state
  • [ ] Retry logic has exponential backoff and max attempts
  • [ ] Rollback is available for failed multi-step operations

Operational

  • [ ] Governance adds minimal latency (< 5ms for auto-approved actions)
  • [ ] The governance layer has no external infrastructure dependencies
  • [ ] Monitoring/alerting exists for blocked actions
  • [ ] The system degrades gracefully if the audit backend is unavailable

How Aegis Addresses Each Item

Checklist Item Aegis Feature
Risk classification 4-tier model (LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH/CRITICAL) per YAML rule
Access control 3-tier approval (auto/approve/block) with 7 handler options
Audit trail SQLite + JSONL + webhook + Python logging backends
Policy management YAML with hot-reload, merge, JSON Schema validation
Framework coverage 7 adapters (LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, MCP, Playwright, httpx)
Error handling Retry with backoff, rollback, fail-safe blocking
Operational < 1ms evaluation, zero external deps, batch audit 
pip install agent-aegis

See the Quick Start to get governed in 5 minutes.