Red Hat leads open-source project to automate AI governance

UPDATED 09:00 EDT / AUGUST 04 2026 AI Red Hat leads open-source project to automate AI governance by Paul Gillin IBM Corp.’s Red Hat subsidiary today announced the formation of asago, an open-source community project intended to turn artificial intelligence governance policies into operational controls that can be deployed with AI systems. Short for AI Safety and Governance Orchestration, asago is intended to connect the work that is now often divided among compliance teams, data scientists and infrastructure administrators. The project aims to automate the process of interpreting policies, assessing risks, recommending safeguards and producing deployment configurations while preserving an audit trail linking each control to the policy requirement behind it. Red Hat said the initiative is needed as enterprises move beyond experimental generative AI projects toward systems and autonomous agents that can remain in production for long periods. That shift makes it harder to reconcile broad governance requirements with the specific tests, guardrails and infrastructure configurations engineers need. Asago will use a standardized platform and workflow spanning four stages. It will first interpret an organization’s governance policies and map their requirements to frameworks and standards such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework, the Open Worldwide Application Security Project’s Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications and the European Union’s AI Act. The mapping will use the IBM AI Risk Atlas. Test and recommend In the second stage, asago will generate and run safety tests tailored to the risks of a particular use case. Based on the results, it will recommend mitigations and guardrails and record the rationale for them. Finally, it translates the controls into deployment-ready configurations for hybrid cloud and Kubernetes environments, including Kubernetes, Terraform and Ansible artifacts. “To be trusted in real-world environments, AI needs measurable testing and operational controls,” said Priya Nagpurkar, vice president of AI Platform at IBM Research, in a statement. “Through the asago community, IBM is contributing our expertise to help bridge the gap between governance frameworks and deployed AI systems.” Red Hat said the approach can replace manual policy interpretation and custom scripts that slow deployments and introduce errors as requirements move between compliance and engineering teams. The project is intended to let auditors trace an active production control back to a specific policy clause, test and supporting evidence. Asago brings together Red Hat, Alquimia AI, Brave Software Inc., the EvalEval coalition, IBM Research, Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria, Microsoft Corp., MIT Lincoln Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Nvidia Corp. and the Alan Turing Institute. It builds on work done by Red Hat and Nvidia through the Open Secure AI Alliance. The software will be released under the Apache License 2.0 and is intended to work across multiple clouds and on-premises infrastructure. Asago is currently in its project formation phase. Developers, researchers and enterprise early adopters can view its GitHub repository and participate in project governance through the project’s website. Image: Bing Image Creator A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecu