Microsoft Launches Agent Control Specification for AI Agent Governance
Original: Microsoft offers devs a better way to control AI agent behavior
Why This Matters
Addresses critical enterprise need for consistent AI agent governance across platforms
Microsoft released Agent Control Specification (ACS), an open-source standard allowing developers to define granular policies for AI agent behavior. The specification enables control at multiple workflow points and works across different frameworks.
Microsoft introduced Agent Control Specification (ACS), an open-source standard addressing enterprise challenges in controlling AI agent behavior across different environments. ACS allows developer, compliance, and security teams to define policies specifying what agents may do, what they must not do, when human approval is required, and what evidence should be logged. The specification checks policies at multiple interception points during agent tasks to ensure guardrails are maintained. Current approaches like system prompts, custom code checks, or classifiers often result in fragmented controls that are difficult to audit and reuse. ACS integrates these into a common governance layer, checking agent compliance before receiving input, before calling tools, after tool results, and before final responses. Policies can allow, block, redact information, or request human approval. The SDK ships with plugins for LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic Agents SDK, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, and other frameworks.