VeriWeave Govern: Evidence-Gated Deterministic Runtime Governance for Enterprise AI Agents
Organizations: Institute for Smart System Technologies, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria · Faculté Polytechnique, Université de Kinshasa, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Abstract
Enterprise artificial-intelligence agents increasingly call tools, modify infrastructure, and process protected data, creating a need to separate action generation from action authorization. This article presents VeriWeave Govern, a deterministic runtime governance layer that evaluates structured agent actions against versioned policies, validates typed evidence, applies fixed deny > review > allow precedence, routes consequential actions to accountable human review, and records replayable tamper-evident audit state. GovernBench evaluates the design over 30 independent seeds and 60,000 oracle-labelled cases spanning five enterprise domains, adversarial evidence, out-of-distribution actions, and temporal policy evolution. VeriWeave achieves 0.9888 mean accuracy, 0.9836 macro-F1, zero observed aggregate false allows, and zero observed Governance Attack Success Rate on the evaluated cases. Six ablations show that evidence gating, deny precedence, out-of-distribution fail-safe behavior, human review, contradiction handling, and temporal replay contribute complementary safety. The deployed API additionally passes 12/12 end-to-end scenarios and a 40,040-request concurrency matrix with zero failures. A separate 150-case EU/Austria regulation-grounded evaluation uses frozen predictions and two independent blinded human annotators, who agree on all decisions. On this set, deterministic engines remain conservative, while a Gemma 4 31B comparator aligns more closely with the human consensus. The results expose a measurable safety--utility trade-off and motivate evidence-aware, replayable governance as an independent control plane for enterprise agent execution.
Figures & tables
| Invariant | Runtime requirement |
|---|---|
| No implicit allow | Unmatched/OOD actions route to review. |
| Deny dominance | A matched prohibition cannot be overridden by an allow rule. |
| Evidence monotonicity | Missing or rejected required evidence cannot improve a decision. |
| Accountability | High-impact rules may remain review-gated even with complete evidence. |
| Temporal fidelity | Decisions bind to policy versions and evaluation time. |
| Replayable integrity | Decision, evidence, reasons, and policy hash remain auditable. |
| Component | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Evaluation API | validate/normalize action, context, and evidence |
| Policy matcher | evaluate versioned predicates and evidence requirements |
| Evidence verifier | score authority, freshness, signatures, contradictions |
| Decision reducer | enforce deny review allow and OOD fail-safe |
| Review router | map consequential cases to accountable human queues |
| Audit/replay | hash-chain records and replay historical policy versions |
| Perturbation | Decision |
|---|---|
| Observed case | allow |
| Remove minimal supporting evidence | review |
| Set external destination + secret data | deny |
| Attack family | Expected defense |
|---|---|
| Stale evidence | freshness/current-source gate |
| Forged signature | signature/evidence-quality rejection |
| Citation laundering | authority + substantive-source scoring |
| Evidence flooding | typed requirements; no vote-by-volume |
| Contradictory evidence | contradiction detection + review |
| Policy downgrade | version/temporal validation |
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Human annotators | 2 |
| Completed pairs | 150 / 150 |
| Raw agreement | 1.000 |
| Cohen’s | 1.000 |
| Disagreements / adjudications | 0 / 0 |
| Human consensus allow/review/deny | 80 / 20 / 50 |
| Method | Accuracy [95% CI] | Macro-F1 | FAR | GASR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RBAC | .5864 [.5845,.5883] | .6012 | .3032 | .7142 |
| ABAC | .4947 [.4945,.4948] | .5468 | .5053 | .8569 |
| VeriWeave | .9888 [.9876,.9899] | .9836 | .0000 | .0000 |
| Removed control | Accuracy | FAR | GASR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evidence gate | .7127 | .2873 | .5715 |
| Contradiction check | .9880 | .0008 | .0067 |
| Human review | .8998 | .0890 | .0000 |
| OOD fail-safe | .8604 | .1284 | .1427 |
| Deny precedence | .7675 | .2115 | .0000 |
| Temporal replay | .9155 | .0665 | .0000 |
| Metric | Mean |
|---|---|
| AUROC | 0.9840 |
| AUPRC | 0.9896 |
| Brier score | 0.1226 |
| Expected Calibration Error | 0.2253 |
| Selected threshold | 0.7600 |
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Correctness scenarios | 12/12 passed |
| Measured requests | 110 |
| Concurrency | 4 |
| Mean latency | 10.42 ms |
| P95 / P99 latency | 17.14 / 19.93 ms |
| Throughput | 371.64 req/s |
| Conc. | Requests | Req/s | P95 ms | Fail. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10,010 | 320.33 | 3.96 | 0 |
| 4 | 10,010 | 413.55 | 13.27 | 0 |
| 16 | 10,010 | 382.72 | 49.81 | 0 |
| 32 | 10,010 | 368.97 | 108.84 | 0 |
| Scenario | Decision | Dominant control |
|---|---|---|
| Trusted low-risk read | allow | accepted policy evidence |
| Outdated evidence | review | evidence-quality gate |
| Deny overrides review | deny | deny precedence |
| Production deployment | review | accountable change review |
| Unknown action | review | OOD fail-safe |
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Total cases | 150 |
| Public administration | 50 |
| Enterprise IT / DevOps | 50 |
| Data / AI governance | 50 |
| Primary-law sources | 21 |
| Temporal source references | 104 |
| Method | Accuracy | Macro-F1 | FAR | FRev |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RBAC | .2400 | .2278 | .0000 | .7600 |
| ABAC | .4267 | .3515 | .0933 | .4800 |
| OPA | .8000 | .7802 | .0000 | .2000 |
| Cedar | .8000 | .7802 | .0000 | .2000 |
| Gemma 4 31B | .9733 | .9573 | .0000 | .0267 |
| VeriWeave | .8000 | .7802 | .0000 | .2000 |
| Case | Request facts | Governance path | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trusted knowledge read | internal, low-impact read; signed/current policy reference | allow rule matches; typed evidence is accepted and complete | allow |
| Production deployment | production deploy; approved change, tests, rollback evidence | production-change control remains accountable despite complete evidence | review |
| Secret external transfer | external destination; secret classification; high-impact context | prohibition and review rule both match; deny precedence resolves conflict | deny |
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