Agent control plane

An agent control plane is the layer that sits between your AI agents and the tools, APIs, and secrets they act on. Every action an agent takes routes through it, which gives the plane three powers: it decides what each agent is allowed to do (scope), enforces your rules before the action runs (guard), and writes an immutable record of what happened (log).

The defining property is interposition — the agent cannot reach a resource without going through the plane. This is what separates a control plane from advisory controls like system prompts or code review. A prompt is a suggestion the model may ignore; the control plane is enforcement in the path that the model cannot route around.

Architecturally, the agent never holds raw upstream credentials. It authenticates to the control plane with its own identity, and the plane brokers the call to the real resource. That single move — credentials behind the plane, identity in front of it — is what makes scope, guard, log, and attribution possible at all.

A control plane is not a model, a framework, or an observability dashboard. It governs whatever agents you already run, and it acts in real time on what’s allowed — not just what already happened.