OWASP project publishes Agent Control Standard for enforcing policy on AI agents

The standard starts from the position that enterprises cannot rely on agents they are unable to see into. It asks that agents be inspectable, traceable and instrumentable, so that an organization can tell what an agent is, what it can reach, what it has done and for what reason, and can control its behavior while it runs.

The document does not prescribe a single product design. It describes hook points that an agent platform exposes and through which policy is applied. Because the policies are declarative and the hooks standardized, the intent is that a rule written once could be enforced on agents built with different frameworks, so that each vendor does not invent its own control scheme.

The project page describes the standard as now part of OWASP's generative AI security work and links to a public GitHub repository. It does not state a version number, name contributing companies or give a roadmap, so how widely agent vendors will adopt the hooks is not yet clear. OWASP is best known for its Top 10 lists of security risks in web applications and, more recently, in large language model applications.