Agent Governance
An agent estate is not governed one agent at a time; it is governed as a population. This area covers the controls that hold across the whole estate: how many agents may exist and how fast they may spawn, what they may spend, the contracts that bind one entity to another, and (distinctively) decisions taken by encrypted ballot rather than by an administrator. These sit above the Alignment gate that decides a single action; together they make an agent estate accountable the way a workforce is.
The controls
| Control | What it governs |
|---|---|
| Population governance | Creation quotas with create, instantiate, and spawn gates; a temporal spawn throttle; a quota advisor; a growth governor that steps quota raises rather than granting them outright; an observation ledger; and a compensation-before-denial path. |
| Spending | Estimated cost checked against agent, workflow, and organization budgets before execution, with spending policy, behavioural guardrails, and a governance audit. |
| Contracts between entities | A seven-part contract model across seven contract types, with multi-party roles, cryptographic signing, service-level objectives with penalties, multi-round negotiation, and a cross-cell searchable registry. |
| Entity voting | Governance decided by ballot: encrypted so the tally is computed without decrypting any individual vote, verified by independent cells. See Voting & quorum governance. |
Population and spending, before an agent runs
Creation and spending are checked before an agent exists or acts, and a denial prefers compensation to a hard stop where policy allows it.
*Figure: the estate governs before it runs. A create, spawn, or spend request passes population governance (quota, spawn throttle, stepped growth) and then spending (agent + workflow + organization budgets); a bound entity contract frames the run; and where policy allows, an over-quota request is offered compensation before denial rather than a hard stop.
Table equivalent
| Stage | Control | On failure |
|---|---|---|
| Create / spawn | Population governance | Compensation offered, else refused |
| Spend | Agent + workflow + org budgets | Refused |
| Bind | Entity contract (signed, SLOs) | Run is contractually framed |
| Run | Observed, metered | Per-agent cost attribution |
Why it is different
- Governance is population-scale. Quotas, throttles, and stepped growth treat the estate as a population with a growth rate, not a set of independent keys.
- Budgets are checked before execution, at three scopes. Agent, workflow, and organization budgets are all consulted before an action runs. See per-agent cost attribution.
- Decisions can be taken by ballot, not by admin. Entity voting makes a governance decision a verifiable, secret ballot. See Voting & quorum governance.
In this area
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Voting & quorum governance | Encrypted ballots, blind signatures, threshold decryption, and tally verification by independent cells |
Related
- Alignment, the net-potential-gain gate that governs a single action.
- Delegation & authority, the grant chain population governance sits over.
- Metering & attribution, the per-agent cost the spending gate reads.