AI Agent Governance for DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering
Technology companies are the earliest adopters of AI agents for code generation, infrastructure automation, incident response, and deployment pipelines. Speed matters, but so does proving that agents operated within authorized boundaries — especially when SOC 2, ISO 27001, or customer security reviews are on the line.
What Goes Wrong Without Controls
A SaaS company deploys agents across its platform engineering team: code review bots, automated deploy pipelines, incident triage agents, and infrastructure-as-code generators. Within two sprints:
- A deploy agent pushes a configuration change to production without the required approval — the change causes a 45-minute outage, and the incident review finds no record of who authorized the deploy
- A code review agent has access to all repositories, including the secrets management repo — no scope boundary restricts which repos the agent can read
- A customer's security team requests evidence that AI agents cannot exfiltrate data from their tenant — the engineering team cannot produce verifiable evidence because agent actions are only logged in application logs
Control Mapping
| Concern | Without Controls | With Claw EA |
|---|---|---|
| Production deploys | Agent deploys autonomously; no approval trail | Approval gate + signed receipt before deploy executes |
| Repository access | Agent has org-wide read access | Scoped tokens restrict access to specific repos |
| Credential handling | Credentials in environment variables, accessible to model context | Secret boundary + credential rotation |
| Customer audit requests | Application logs (mutable, not verifiable) | Proof bundles (signed, offline-verifiable) |
| Rate limiting | No cap on agent API calls | Rate limits per agent, per endpoint, per time window |
Recommended Control Stack
Deploy Approvals
Human sign-off before production deploys. Receipt captures approver, timestamp, and the exact artifact being deployed.
GitHub Actions Pipeline
Claw Verified PR check validates signed commit proofs on every agent-generated PR.
Credential Rotation
Rotate agent credentials on schedule. Rotation events produce signed receipts. Old credentials are revoked immediately.
Rate Limits
Cap API calls per agent, per endpoint, per time window. Prevents runaway agents from overwhelming upstream services.