Trust and adoption model

Open contracts. Commercial plane.

A security-critical runtime sitting below your production agents cannot be evaluated solely by reading a datasheet. The enforcement contract — the interface between agents and the platform — is open source, auditable by your security team, and forkable.

The commercial layer covers the enterprise operational features that regulated buyers specifically require. This is the same model that built trust for Vault, GitLab, and Grafana in security-sensitive environments. Community adoption earns the trust. Enterprise contract provides the operational depth.

What is open and what is commercial

The open-source surface is the contract layer between agents and the runtime — manifest schema, framework adapter SDK, audit event format, MCP gateway plugin interface, policy templates, local development harness. These contracts are open by design: they are how customer-built agents reach the runtime, and they need to be auditable, forkable, and ultimately standardisable.

The plane itself is the commercial product. This includes the encapsulated execution engine, the enforcement layer, the evidence ledger, the estate intelligence service, and the operational tooling for Tier A/B/C deployments. The plane is what you license; the contracts are what your developers build against.

This split is what allows the contracts to be audited and standardised without putting the runtime's security envelope into community hands.

Apache 2.0

Open source

Auditable by your security team. Forkable. Self-runnable for development and evaluation.

Agent manifest schemaThe contract between agents and the platform.
Framework adapter SDKBuild adapters for new frameworks. The integration surface between customer-built agents and the runtime — community-extensible.
Audit event schemaOTel semantic conventions for governed agent runtime.
MCP gateway plugin interfaceThe egress enforcement contract.
Policy format & templatesPolicy templates are starter examples for runtime enforcement. Validated compliance mappings and evidence exports are part of the enterprise layer.
Local runtime harnessFor development and evaluation without the enterprise stack.

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cogward Enterprise

Commercial layer

What you license. What justifies the contract and the support SLA.

Enterprise registryMulti-tenant management with RBAC and audit.
Policy management consoleVersioning, approval workflow, drift detection.
Evidence store & GRC exportServiceNow, Archer, Vanta, Hyperproof.
Tier B/C deployment toolingOn-premise and air-gapped operational tooling, including signed-media intelligence delivery.
Agent evaluation gateBehaviour validation and evidence-backed promotion.
Data lineage, policy sandboxAdvanced capabilities — see roadmap.
Compliance certification & SLADirect work with your auditors. SLA-backed support.

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Standards ambition

Not just open-source code. Open specifications.

The agent manifest schema and audit event format are published as open specifications — not just open-source code. The open specification starts as the adoption surface for cogward deployments. If it proves useful across enough real enterprise environments, it can evolve into a broader standard. The first milestone is operational adoption, not standards theater.

Standards create ecosystem moats that proprietary code cannot. When every AI framework, GRC platform, and identity provider knows what an agent manifest looks like, cogward's plane is the natural implementation. That is a durable structural advantage.

This is how Vault became the trusted secret store, how OpenTelemetry became the observability standard, and how Kubernetes became the deployment contract. The specification comes first. The enterprise operational layer follows.

Extensibility

Build on the open contract.

The adapter SDK defines a stable, narrow interface. Implement two methods: tool call interception and context propagation. The runtime handles everything else. Community-contributed adapters for new frameworks can be published independently — the adapter interface is open and versioned.

Policy templates follow the same model. Publish your own regulatory mapping as an open policy template. Community adoption of a template increases confidence in its coverage — and in the evidence it produces.

Audit event schema extensions follow the OTel semantic convention contribution model. Propose a new event type, publish the schema, and any runtime that implements the open spec will emit it.

What open core is not

Open core does not mean cogward becomes a connector marketplace, model gateway, memory platform, or agent authoring tool. The open layer defines the runtime contract. The commercial layer operates, governs, and supports that contract at enterprise scale.