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Should agent governance live in the interface or the engine?
Why the layer that enforces the rules matters more than the layer that asks, and what breaks when they are the same thing.
The short answer
Governance should be enforced in the engine that runs the work, not only in the interface that asks for it. The engine is where authorization, state transitions, evidence, and the actual result can be checked together.
Where rules are enforced
Many agent platforms enforce rules in the assistant layer. That means governance holds for the interface it was built into, but not necessarily for anything calling underneath it. If the rules live in the engine instead, the same decisions apply whether the caller is a person, an assistant, or another system.
The important failure mode is a gap between what the interface says and what the engine did. An interface can report an outcome that the engine refused. An audit record assembled from interface claims rather than engine results is not evidence of what actually happened.
How VeroTX enforces governance
In VeroTX, authorization, transitions, and evidence are enforced by the runtime across the product's shipped interfaces and runtime paths. A refused action stays refused regardless of who asked, and run state lives in the engine rather than in the conversation.
Every action is recorded in the Execution Ledger by the runtime rather than added afterward. The record therefore reflects the engine's result, including approvals, refusals, evidence, and the Playbook version governing the run.
Where to next
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Product and platform pages on the same topic, drawn from the VeroTX knowledge base.
Search everything in one place in the Research Center, or ask Veroli, which answers from the same knowledge base.