Paperclip Governance: Compliance, Policies, and Guardrails

Deploying AI agents without governance is a risk. Your agents represent your brand, handle customer data, and make decisions on your behalf. Here’s how to deploy responsibly.

Why Governance Matters

Ungoverned agents can:

• Generate harmful or offensive content
• Leak sensitive information
• Make unauthorized commitments
• Produce inconsistent or inaccurate responses
• Violate industry regulations

Governance isn’t about restricting agents — it’s about making them reliable and trustworthy.

Content Policies

Input Filtering

Define what inputs your agent should reject:

• Harmful content — violence, hate speech, illegal activities
• PII exposure — social security numbers, credit card numbers
• Injection attempts — prompts designed to override behavior
• Off-topic queries — questions outside the agent’s scope

Configure input filters in your agent settings. HostAgentes applies them before the request reaches the LLM.

Output Filtering

Define what outputs your agent should never produce:

• Confidential information — internal URLs, API keys, employee data
• Medical advice — if not a healthcare agent
• Financial advice — if not a licensed financial agent
• Legal conclusions — if not a legal agent
• Harmful content — any content that could cause harm

Output filters scan responses before they reach users.

Tone and Style Guidelines

Define acceptable tone:

• Professional — for business agents
• Friendly — for consumer-facing agents
• Technical — for developer tools
• Neutral — for informational agents

Decision Logging

Log every significant agent decision:

• Tool calls made — what was called, with what parameters
• Data accessed — which databases or APIs were queried
• Actions taken — what the agent did on behalf of the user
• Escalation decisions — when and why the agent escalated

Retention Policies

Log Type	Retention	Reason
Conversation logs	90 days	Quality monitoring
Decision logs	1 year	Compliance
Audit logs	2 years	Regulatory
Security events	3 years	Incident investigation

Compliance Frameworks

GDPR

For agents handling EU user data:

• Deploy in EU regions
• Implement data deletion on request
• Provide data export capability
• Maintain processing records
• Appoint a Data Protection Officer (your organization)

SOC 2

For agents handling sensitive business data:

• Enable comprehensive audit logging
• Use encrypted environment variables
• Implement access controls
• Regular security reviews
• Incident response procedures

HIPAA

For agents handling healthcare data:

• Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with HostAgentes (Scale plan)
• PHI encryption at rest and in transit
• Access controls and authentication
• Breach notification procedures
• Regular risk assessments

AI-Specific Regulations

Emerging AI regulations require:

• Transparency — disclose when users interact with AI
• Human oversight — ensure humans can review and override decisions
• Bias monitoring — regularly test for biased outputs
• Documentation — maintain records of AI system behavior

Guardrails Implementation

Confidence Thresholds

Set minimum confidence levels:

• High confidence → respond directly
• Medium confidence → respond with caveat
• Low confidence → escalate to human

Rate Limiting per User

Prevent abuse:

• Max conversations per user per day
• Max tool calls per conversation
• Max token usage per session

Human-in-the-Loop

For high-stakes decisions:

• Financial transactions above threshold
• Medical recommendations
• Legal interpretations
• Account changes

Configure which actions require human approval before execution.

Monitoring Governance

Quality Metrics

Track governance-relevant metrics:

• Content filter trigger rate (should be low)
• Escalation rate (should be reasonable)
• User complaint rate (should be near zero)
• Accuracy rate on test sets

Regular Audits

Conduct monthly governance reviews:

1. Sample 50-100 conversations
2. Review for policy compliance
3. Check for bias or harmful content
4. Verify escalation accuracy
5. Document findings and improvements

Automated Testing

Set up automated governance tests:

• Red team tests — try to make the agent break policy
• Bias tests — check for differential treatment
• Accuracy tests — verify factual correctness
• Safety tests — attempt harmful output generation

Run these weekly and review results.

Getting Started

Governance features are available on all plans. Advanced compliance (BAA, custom retention, SSO) requires the Scale plan.

See compliance features →