Agent Governance Framework

Google Cloud’s four-vector framing for evaluating whether enterprise agents are behaving acceptably in production.

Key points

Policy adherence: agents obey internal rules such as “do not write to external-facing databases” and the organization can prove that adherence ^[src-043].
Intent loyalty: agents remain faithful to the original user or business intent across tool calls and agent handoffs ^[src-043].
Safety guardrails: agents behave ethically and in line with the company’s brand, safety posture, and responsible-AI rules ^[src-043].
Fiscal responsibility: agents use tokens and tool/API/MCP calls judiciously and reserve limited budget for the right priority work ^[src-043].
The framework is explicitly tied to observability: enforcing rules is insufficient unless teams can observe adherence, drift, violations, and attempted violations ^[src-043].

^[src-043] Google Cloud Events — “Operationalize AI: A blueprint for managing enterprise agents at scale” (2026-04-24)