Governance by Construction for Generalist Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Enterprise agents are increasingly expected to operate autonomously across tools and interfaces, yet production deployments require governance by construction. Systems must specify which actions are allowed, when human oversight is required, and what information may be exposed, without rebuilding the agent for each domain. This demo presents CUGA's policy system, a modular policy-as-code layer that composes with a generalist LLM agent to deliver predictable, auditable, and compliance-aware behavior in compound workflows without model fine-tuning. We present a runtime governance architecture that enforces policy interventions at every critical stage of execution. Rather than passively constraining behavior, policies intercept the agent at five structural checkpoints: upstream of planning (Intent Guard), within the system prompt to steer reasoning (Playbook), at the tool-call boundary to enforce proper usage (Tool Guide), outside the reasoning loop as a Human-in-the-Loop gate for high-risk actions (Tool Approvals), and at the output stage to filter and structure the final response (Output Formatter). Together, these stages embed governance continuously across the agent's execution pipeline rather than treating it as an afterthought. Using a healthcare scenario and a multi-layered enforcement intervention, the demo shows dynamic playbook injection for structured tool-sequence enforcement, intent guards that block malicious or accidental harmful requests, and human-in-the-loop tool approval checkpoints for potentially destructive actions. The artifact illustrates how typed governance primitives enable faster, safer deployment of enterprise agentic systems while improving policy adherence and execution consistency.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 19 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.
Builds on
19 of 33 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
- 2025SecureWebArena: A Holistic Security Evaluation Benchmark for LVLM-based Web Agents11 Oct
- 2025Towards Enforcing Company Policy Adherence in Agentic Workflows22 Jul
- 2025MLA-Trust: Benchmarking Trustworthiness of Multimodal LLM Agents in GUI Environments2 Jun
- 2025AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents31 May
- 2025Think Twice Before You Act: Enhancing Agent Behavioral Safety with Thought Correction16 May
- 2025ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning26 Mar
- 2025Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safety2 Feb
- 2024ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents9 Oct
Other references · 11
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
- 2020MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformerscited by 1,463
- 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agentscited by 401
- 2025Contextual Agent Security: A Policy for Every Purposecited by 59
- 2025Towards Trustworthy GUI Agents: A Surveycited by 34
- 2025Towards Enterprise-Ready Computer Using Generalist Agentcited by 31
- 2025Governance-as-a-Service: A Multi-Agent Framework for AI System Compliance and Policy Enforcementcited by 17
- 2024From Grounding to Planning: Benchmarking Bottlenecks in Web Agentscited by 12
- 2024SNAP: Semantic Stories for Next Activity Predictioncited by 8
- 2022Prescriptive Process Monitoring in Intelligent Process Automation with Chatbot Orchestrationcited by 6
- 2025From Benchmarks to Business Impact: Deploying IBM Generalist Agent in Enterprise Productioncited by 5
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Runtime Governance for AI Agents: Policies on Paths
- 2026A Five-Plane Reference Architecture for Runtime Governance of Production AI Agents
- 2026Organizational Control Layer: Governance Infrastructure at the Execution Boundary of LLM Agent Systems
- 2026Agentao: A Policy-Governed Runtime Harness for Embeddable Tool-Using LLM Agents
- 2026SARC: A Governance-by-Architecture Framework for Agentic AI Systems
- 2026From Governance Norms to Enforceable Controls: A Layered Translation Method for Runtime Guardrails in Agentic AI
- 2026ActGov: Governing LLM Agent Actions via Policy-Constrained Validation
- 2026Behavioral Governance for Autonomous AI Agents: The AgentBound Framework