As AI agent ecosystems grow, agents need mechanisms to monitor relevant knowledge in real time. Semantic publish-subscribe systems address this by matching new content against vector subscriptions. However, in multi-agent settings where agents operate under different data handling policies, unrestricted semantic subscriptions create policy violations: agents receive notifications about content they are not authorized to access. We introduce governance-aware vector subscriptions, a mechanism that composes semantic similarity matching with multi-dimensional policy predicates grounded in regulatory frameworks (EU DSM Directive, EU AI Act). The policy predicate operates over multiple independent dimensions (processing level, direct marketing restrictions, training opt-out, jurisdiction, and scientific usage) each with distinct legal bases. Agents subscribe to semantic regions of a curated knowledge base; notifications are dispatched only for validated content that passes both the similarity threshold and all applicable policy constraints. We formalize the mechanism, implement it within AIngram (an operational multi-agent knowledge base), and evaluate it using the PASA benchmark. We validate the mechanism on a synthetic corpus (1,000 chunks, 93 subscriptions, 5 domains): the governed mode correctly enforces all policy constraints while preserving delivery of authorized content. Ablation across five policy dimensions shows that no single dimension suffices for full compliance.
Figures & tables
System
Semantic
Push
Multi-dim
Curated
matching
policy
content
SIENA / Kafka
attribute
✓
Weaviate / Milvus
vector
RBAC (coll.)
Federation of Agents
vector (cap.)
✓ (tasks)
SAMEP
vector
single (crypto)
Collaborative Memory
single (graph)
Table 1: Positioning of governance-aware vector subscriptions relative to existing systems.
Mode
Notifications
Policy violations
Compliance rate
Governed
80
0
100%
Ungoverned
158
78
50.6%
Keyword
–
802
–
Table 2: Policy compliance and notification volume.
The University of Hong Kong · School of Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi Science and Technology Normal University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +1