Intent Loyalty
Governance criterion for whether an agent system remains faithful to the original user or business intent as work passes through reasoning steps, tools, and other agents.
Key points
- Google Cloud lists intent loyalty as one of the four governance vectors for enterprise agents [src-043].
- Intent loyalty becomes harder in multi-agent systems because each handoff can introduce drift or hallucination [src-043].
- Observability must track whether an answer or action is still aligned with the original request, not only whether API calls succeeded [src-043].
- Monitoring needs to distinguish accidental policy attempts from aberrant intent, because an agent may try a blocked action while honestly attempting to complete the task [src-043].
Related concepts
Source references
- [src-043] Google Cloud Events — “Operationalize AI: A blueprint for managing enterprise agents at scale” (2026-04-24)