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Two Levels of Control

ArgentOS gives you control over your agent’s behavior at two levels, depending on your needs:
Safety Rules (Core)Intent Governance (Business)
Who it’s forEveryoneTeams, MSPs, enterprise
What it doesSet basic boundaries — what your agent should never do, and what needs your approvalFull three-tier policy hierarchy with departments, monotonic inheritance, simulation gates, and industry packs
Where to find itDashboard > Settings > Safety RulesDashboard > Settings > Advanced Governance Console
Complexity3 settings + 2 listsFull policy engine with 20+ configurable fields
Both systems use the same underlying intent engine. Safety Rules is a simplified interface that writes to the same config. You can start with Safety Rules and upgrade to full governance when you need it.

Safety Rules (Core)

Available to all ArgentOS users. Set basic guardrails for your agent in under a minute. Read the Safety Rules guide Three controls:
  1. Cautiousness level — How careful should your agent be? (Relaxed, Balanced, Strict)
  2. Never do — Actions that are always blocked, regardless of context
  3. Requires approval — Actions where your agent will ask before proceeding

Intent Governance (Business)

For teams running multiple agents across departments with compliance requirements. Read the Governance guide Full hierarchical policy engine:
  • Global > Department > Agent inheritance (children can only tighten, never loosen)
  • Monotonic rules — neverDo is additive, allowedActions is subset-only, escalation thresholds get stricter
  • Simulation gates — Test agent behavior before deployment
  • Industry packs — Pre-built configurations for law, medical, financial, MSP, and more
  • Department templates — Support, Engineering, MSP Ops, Research

How They Relate

Safety Rules writes enabled, runtimeMode, globalPolicy.neverDo, and globalPolicy.requiresHumanApproval. The Governance Console exposes the full hierarchy. Both read and write the same intent config block.