Important Guardian Agents and Agent Contracts are available in private preview. The screens, terminology, and behavior described in this section are based on pre-release designs and are subject to change before general availability.
As AI agents move into production, they can access sensitive data, call tools, and take actions autonomously, often faster than deployment-time policies or periodic reviews can keep up with. Guardian Agents extend control into runtime by continuously monitoring agent behavior against the rules set in an agent contract, and responding when an agent moves outside its established boundaries, from flagging and escalating an issue to redirecting or blocking the action.
- Agent Contract
- A governed, versioned asset that defines, in natural language, what an AI agent is allowed to do, what data it can access, and what outcomes it is responsible for. An agent contract turns informal expectations about agent behavior into a reviewable, auditable set of rules.
- Guardian Agent
- A runtime system that monitors an AI agent's actions against its Agent Contract, and intervenes, by denying, escalating, flagging, or rewriting an action, when that action violates the Agent Contract. Guardian lets you investigate and adjust the behavior of a single flagged agent without halting all other operations, containing risk while keeping the rest of your AI landscape running.
An agent contract can exist on its own, as a record of intended agent behavior. Guardian is what turns that record into active, real-time enforcement: without an agent contract, there is nothing for Guardian to enforce; without Guardian enabled, an agent contract only states what the agent is allowed and not allowed to do, and nothing enforces it at runtime.
How Guardian connects to an agent
Guardian attaches to an AI agent as an SDK installed directly in the agent's code.
Guardian attaches to an AI agent in one of two ways:
- As an SDK installed directly in the agent's code, the primary path for agents you can modify directly.
- As a Gateway, an HTTP proxy compatible with major LLM provider APIs, for agents you can't modify directly, such as legacy systems, third-party agents, or workflow tools.
The SDK intercepts agents built with LangChain and LangGraph. You can add it to your agent in several ways, from two lines of code (activating Guardian and adding its middleware) to no code changes at all (launching the agent through the Collibra command line interface). The SDK enforces your rules from a bundle that Guardian creates from the Agent Contract, which you download with the Collibra command line interface. Without a bundle, Guardian allows every action.
- For information on enabling Guardian Agents and Agent Contracts, go to Set up AI Command Center.
- Learn more about the Agent Contract model.
- Learn more about Guardian Agent runtime enforcement.