Governance Substrate Reference Architecture
Description
Governance Substrate is a reference architecture for enforcing AI-agent capabilities at the system boundary rather than relying only on prompt-level instructions.
Governance Substrate v0.7.0 is an open-source reference implementation of runtime-enforced governance for AI agents. It places authorization and execution controls outside the model, enforcing scoped permissions, one-use execution grants, governed data provenance, verified worker shutdown, and auditable execution outcomes.
The October 2026 release introduces a separated Docker deployment with isolated agents, controlled file and network access, protected credentials, independent audit observation, and persistent audit witnessing.
Recorded evaluations demonstrate legitimate live-agent execution, denial of unauthorized file and service operations, 20 audited denials across seven hostile-worker scenarios, and 54 blocked bypass probes per scenario. Additional tests demonstrate actual SMTP delivery under valid authority and prevention of additional delivery after grant replay or revocation.
The evidence applies to the documented configurations and historical source versions. It does not establish universal AI confinement or security against a compromised trusted host.
Source repository: https://github.com/electricwolfemarshmallowhypertext/gov-substrate
GitHub release: https://github.com/electricwolfemarshmallowhypertext/gov-substrate/releases/tag/v0.7.0
Associated research paper (V3, October 2026): https://zenodo.org/records/23348071
License: AGPL-3.0-or-later. Separate commercial licensing is available by agreement.
Release date: October 12, 2026.
| Version 0.6.0 Verified against the release tag, architecture sheet, and CI. This version adds a shared runtime conformance contract tested in recorded Docker, Podman, gVisor, WASI, OpenShell, native Linux and Windows, and Kubernetes environments. It also adds task-scoped authority, incident-derived escape tests, stronger provider-gateway and audit controls, and automatic containment with verified shutdown receipts. Release-commit CI passed 14 jobs, including real Qwen inference and runtime enforcement. | Version 0.5.0 Verified against the v0.5.0 release tag and architecture sheet. This version adds one-use execution grants, a scoped circuit breaker, verified Docker worker shutdown and orphan recovery, plus real isolation probes. The release passed 91 unit tests, four real Qwen acceptance tests, four real Phi-4 Mini acceptance tests, and five environment probes. Bounded hosted validation also covered direct Gemini and pinned OpenRouter GLM, Grok, and Kimi routes. |
| Version 0.4.0 Implements governed state transitions, destination-scoped network access, scoped filesystem authority, delegated-service handling, sensitive-data egress controls, classified-object provenance, operator-audited declassification, tamper detection, fail-closed behavior, and auditable execution outcomes for isolated agents. The architecture passed a 23-test deterministic suite and repeated the same five governed object-provenance scenarios across Qwen 3.5 4B, Llama 3.1 8B, GPT-6 Luna, and GPT-6 Sol. It is designed as an executable companion to Governance as Substrate: Engineering Patterns for Resilient Collective Systems. | Version 0.3.0 Established the initial governed state, network, and filesystem boundaries, including tamper detection, fail-closed behavior, and auditable execution outcomes for isolated agents. It was validated with deterministic adversarial tests and an initial hosted-model smoke test. |
Files
Governance-Substrate-Reference-Architecture-v0.7.0.pdf
Files
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Additional details
Additional titles
- Alternative title (English)
- Governance Substrate Reference Architecture v0.3.0
Related works
- Is supplement to
- Preprint: 10.5281/zenodo.23002435 (DOI)
Dates
- Copyrighted
-
2026-09-27Date of copyright
Software
- Repository URL
- https://github.com/electricwolfemarshmallowhypertext/gov-substrate
- Programming language
- Python , Rust , C
- Development Status
- Active