Governance-as-a-Service: A Multi-Agent Framework for AI System Compliance and Policy Enforcement

TL;DR

This paper introduces Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS), a modular runtime enforcement layer for AI systems that ensures compliance and policy adherence in multi-agent ecosystems without modifying models.

Contribution

GaaS is a novel, scalable, policy-driven framework that enforces governance at runtime, supporting adaptive interventions and trust scoring in heterogeneous AI agent systems.

Findings

GaaS effectively blocks high-risk behaviors in simulations.

Trust scores correlate with rule adherence and help identify untrustworthy agents.

GaaS maintains system throughput while enforcing policies.

Abstract

As AI systems evolve into distributed ecosystems with autonomous execution, asynchronous reasoning, and multi-agent coordination, the absence of scalable, decoupled governance poses a structural risk. Existing oversight mechanisms are reactive, brittle, and embedded within agent architectures, making them non-auditable and hard to generalize across heterogeneous deployments. We introduce Governance-as-a-Service (GaaS): a modular, policy-driven enforcement layer that regulates agent outputs at runtime without altering model internals or requiring agent cooperation. GaaS employs declarative rules and a Trust Factor mechanism that scores agents based on compliance and severity-weighted violations. It enables coercive, normative, and adaptive interventions, supporting graduated enforcement and dynamic trust modulation. To evaluate GaaS, we conduct three simulation regimes with open-source models (LLaMA3, Qwen3, DeepSeek-R1) across content generation and financial decision-making. In the baseline, agents act without governance; in the second, GaaS enforces policies; in the third, adversarial agents probe robustness. All actions are intercepted, evaluated, and logged for analysis. Results show that GaaS reliably blocks or redirects high-risk behaviors while preserving throughput. Trust scores track rule adherence, isolating and penalizing untrustworthy components in multi-agent systems. By positioning governance as a runtime service akin to compute or storage, GaaS establishes infrastructure-level alignment for interoperable agent ecosystems. It does not teach agents ethics; it enforces them.