AI Governance Institute

AI Governance Controls

Choose a control domain to see what your team needs to implement. Each control includes regulatory mappings, maturity levels, and implementation guidance.

See how controls form an AI governance framework. You can also compare tools organized by the same control domains.

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Get the free Excel tracker for all 136 governance controls. Score maturity, assign owners, and set deadlines, with EU AI Act, NIST and ISO 42001 coverage on a dashboard.

  • 136 controls in Excel
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HOC

Human Oversight

Review gates, approval workflows, and override mechanisms for AI decisions.

7 controls

AGT

Agentic AI

Goal constraints, action boundaries, and escalation paths for autonomous AI agents.

30 controls

SEC

Security

Defenses against crafted inputs that trick AI into misbehaving, including prompt injection, plus controls on who can use each model.

7 controls

ALC

Audit & Logging

Tamper-proof records of AI decisions, inputs, outputs, and which model version produced them.

5 controls

CHM

Change Management

Model release governance, version rollback, and change approval workflows.

5 controls

DGC

Data Governance

Training data provenance, privacy controls, and data retention policies.

6 controls

MON

Monitoring & Drift

Catching AI accuracy that slips over time (drift), alerts on unusual behavior, and operational dashboards.

6 controls

SAF

Safety & Reliability

Safe fallbacks when AI fails, output checks, and reliable behavior when someone tries to trick the system.

6 controls

IRC

Incident Response

Containment, investigation, and remediation procedures for AI system failures.

6 controls

PRC

Procurement

Third-party AI vendor due diligence, contractual obligations, and offboarding.

18 controls

CMP

Regulatory Compliance

Multi-jurisdiction regulatory mapping, standards monitoring, and compliance architecture for AI systems.

10 controls

BRD

Board & Executive Governance

Board education, committee charters, executive reporting, risk appetite, and enterprise-wide AI governance program design.

11 controls

MGV

Model & Program Governance

Model lifecycle policy, intake and approval workflows, evaluation frameworks, and program-level AI governance maturity.

10 controls

SCT

Sector-Specific & Emerging

Healthcare, insurance, critical infrastructure, national security, and emerging-use-case controls not covered by domain-general frameworks.

9 controls

Medium effort×Agent-relevant×Clear all

52 controls matching filters

HOC

Human Oversight

3 controls
AGT

Agentic AI

22 controls
AGT-002
Agentmedium

Agent Prompt Injection Defense

Protect AI agents from prompt injection attacks, hidden instructions planted in outside content that take over agent behavior.

AGT-003
Agentmedium

Agent Memory and Context Governance

Set rules for agent memory and information kept between sessions. Define permitted content, retention periods, access rights, and deletion conditions.

AGT-005
Agentmedium

Human Approval Gate for Irreversible Agent Actions

Require explicit human approval before hard-to-reverse AI agent actions. Examples include communications, record changes, transactions, and data deletion.

AGT-006
Agentmedium

Agent Action Audit Trail

Log every AI agent tool call, decision step, memory read or write, and external interaction. Records must allow reconstruction of the full action sequence.

AGT-007
Agentmedium

Agent Scope and Task Boundaries

Set and enforce each agent’s permitted activity. Prevent actions beyond its intended purpose.

AGT-010
Agentmedium

Agent Knowledge Source Integrity

Check documents, databases, and external sources retrieved by agents. Verify that nobody has tampered with, poisoned, or substituted the content.

AGT-012
Agentmedium

Agent Kill Switch and Emergency Stop

Maintain an immediate stop for any agent session, workflow, or type of agent. It must work without agent cooperation and support recovery to a known-safe state.

AGT-013
Agentmedium

Kill-Switch Propagation Testing

Test emergency stops across subagents and agents running in parallel. Verify that all agent activity stops within a defined time window.

AGT-014
Agentmedium

Multi-Agent Delegation Chain Logging

Log every action in systems where AI agents work together. Preserve enough detail to identify its originating instruction, authorized agent, and responsible person.

AGT-015
Agentmedium

Agent OAuth Scope Drift Detection

Monitor AI agents’ OAuth permissions (scopes). Alert when permissions exceed the authorized set or arrive outside the formal approval process.

AGT-016
Agentmedium

Agentic AI Deployment Readiness Assessment

Assess tool-using AI agents before deployment. Verify governance controls and evaluate potential effects on connected systems before launch.

AGT-017
Agentmedium

Agentic Autonomy Expansion Criteria

Define criteria for expanding agent autonomy after deployment. Require supporting evidence and approval through the same governance process used for initial deployment.

AGT-018
Agentmedium

Agent Data Modification Blast-Radius Containment

Limit which data each agent can change. Cap the damage from malfunctions, misuse, or prompt injection, and make affected data recoverable.

AGT-019
Agentmedium

AI Tool and Plugin Supply Chain Risk Assessment

Assess supply-chain risks from agents’ third-party tools, plugins, and extensions. Include AI-generated code added to production software. Apply software supply-chain controls to these outside components.

AGT-020
Agentmedium

RAG Retrieval Boundary Controls for Regulated Data

Set retrieval boundaries in RAG (AI document lookup) pipelines. Keep regulated, classified, and out-of-scope data out of what AI agents see to prevent unauthorized disclosure or sensitive-data mixing.

AGT-022
Agentmedium

Agentic AI Governance Tooling Attestation

Obtain vendor attestations before using platform tools as primary agent oversight controls. Verify that monitoring data (telemetry) is complete, tamper-evident, and adequate for governance.

AGT-024
Agentmedium

AI Permission Escalation Tabletop Exercise Program

Run recurring tabletop exercises on AI agents gaining and spreading unauthorized permissions. Test containment controls, incident detection, response effectiveness, and governance procedures.

AGT-025
Agentmedium

Agent Access Entitlement Runtime Re-Validation

Re-check an agent's access entitlements against current policy at the moment it requests a resource, not only when it was last deployed or reviewed. A revoked or narrowed entitlement takes effect on the agent's next request, not at the next release cycle.

AGT-026
Agentmedium

Mid-Task Agent Intervention Protocol

Give human overseers a way to redirect, pause, or correct an agent while it is mid-task, without having to invoke a full kill switch or wait for the task to finish.

AGT-028
Agentmedium

Agent External System Access Boundaries

Limit which outside websites, services, and government systems each agent may contact. Stop agents that keep retrying after being blocked, and alert on any contact outside the approved list.

AGT-029
Agentmedium

User-Built Agent Go-Live Review

Require a proportionate review before any agent built by an employee on a self-service platform goes live. Match the depth of review to what the agent can reach and do.

AGT-030
Agentmedium

MCP Server Inventory and Configuration Baseline

Keep an inventory of every MCP server (the connectors that let AI agents use tools and data) in the organization. Hold each one to a baseline for authentication, permissions, logging, and data-loss coverage.

SEC

Security

3 controls
ALC

Audit & Logging

1 control
CHM

Change Management

2 controls
DGC

Data Governance

3 controls
MON

Monitoring & Drift

1 control
SAF

Safety & Reliability

4 controls
IRC

Incident Response

3 controls
PRC

Procurement

1 control
MGV

Model & Program Governance

5 controls
SCT

Sector-Specific & Emerging

4 controls