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Technical Charter

Agent Governance Toolkit

Effective: May 2026

1. Mission

The Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT) provides open-source, runtime-enforceable governance for autonomous AI agents. The project delivers deterministic policy evaluation, identity verification, audit logging, and compliance tooling that organizations can embed into any agent framework or orchestration platform.

2. Technical Steering

The project is led by a Project Lead and governed by a group of Core Maintainers as defined in GOVERNANCE.md. Together they form the Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

TSC responsibilities:

  • Set technical direction and architectural priorities
  • Approve or reject significant design changes (via ADR process in docs/adr/)
  • Manage the release process described in docs/RELEASE.md
  • Maintain the project's security posture and respond to vulnerability reports
  • Ensure conformance with the project's formal specifications (docs/specs/)
  • Onboard new maintainers per the process in GOVERNANCE.md

TSC composition:

The TSC consists of all individuals listed in MAINTAINERS.md under "Project Lead" and "Core Maintainers." The project actively seeks maintainers from multiple organizations to avoid single-vendor control.

Meetings:

TSC decisions are made asynchronously via GitHub Issues and Pull Requests. Synchronous meetings may be scheduled as needed and announced in GitHub Discussions. Meeting notes are posted publicly.

3. Intellectual Property Policy

License: All code and documentation in this repository is licensed under the MIT License.

Contributions: All contributors must agree to the Microsoft CLA before their first contribution can be merged. The CLA grants a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license for the contribution.

Inbound = Outbound: Contributions are accepted under the same license as the project (MIT). No contributor may submit code under a more restrictive license.

Third-party dependencies: New dependencies must use licenses compatible with MIT. The CI pipeline (dependency-review.yml) automatically rejects dependencies with copyleft or unknown licenses.

4. Specifications and Conformance

The project maintains formal specifications in docs/specs/ using RFC 2119 keywords. Specifications are versioned independently from the code and require TSC approval for changes.

Conformance tests in tests/spec_conformance/ validate that implementations match the specifications. All SDK implementations (Python, TypeScript, .NET, Rust, Go) must pass conformance tests before release.

5. Trademark

"Agent Governance Toolkit" and "AGT" are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Use of these marks in derivative works requires compliance with the Microsoft Trademark Guidelines.

6. Amendments

Changes to this charter require a pull request with approval from at least two Core Maintainers and a one-week public comment period announced in GitHub Discussions. The voting thresholds in GOVERNANCE.md apply.

7. Foundation Transition

If the project is accepted into a foundation (e.g., the AI Alliance, Linux Foundation, or similar), this charter will be superseded by the foundation's technical charter template. The TSC will work with the foundation to ensure continuity of governance, maintainer rights, and contributor agreements during the transition.