Cogward is the runtime foundation where agents execute, actions that change something are controlled, and production evidence is generated. Teams keep their preferred frameworks and models; Cogward provides the governed boundary around them: execution, isolation, identity, authority, policy, lifecycle, evidence, and evaluation.
This page explains how the platform is structured and why the layers belong together.
It describes the full platform architecture. See the capability map for what is available today, in preview, and planned.
Each layer depends on the ones beneath it. Agents run inside the runtime foundation; control is enforced in the execution path; evidence is generated as a byproduct of that execution; and the governed lifecycle is what the runtime makes possible once every production run flows through the same boundary. Each layer maps to a capability group you can inspect in detail.
Cogward separates durable session state from disposable workers. Tenant, user, version, delegated authority, workspace, approvals, and evidence lineage remain bound to the session, while execution can pause, recover, or move between isolated workers without losing that continuity.
Sessions survive pauses and failures while state stays bound to the correct tenant, agent, version, and user.
External access is a property of the runtime, not a library each framework and product team has to wire up correctly. Every outbound call is mediated at one boundary below the framework, where identity, authority, policy, credentials, and approval are applied before the action runs.
The runtime constrains external access to approved routes. The agent reaches models, tools, APIs, networks, and data through the governed boundary, not around it.
The agent does not hold upstream credentials. They are custodied by the runtime and applied only to approved destinations, per action.
Identity, delegated scope, destination, data classification, applicable policy, and approval state are resolved for each action, then recorded.
Every run carries its own control-plane-derived identity, and every governed action records who acted and whose authority was carried. Authority narrows at each delegation boundary, so downstream agents cannot receive more than the upstream principal and agent contract permit.
Stop, suspend, drain, quarantine, contain, and roll back are runtime operations applied at run, session, version, agent, tenant, product, or environment scope. Human approval is a first-class runtime state, not an advisory flag the agent can ignore.
Outcomes at the boundary
Because every policy decision, approval, lifecycle event, and controlled model or tool call passes through the execution path, the record is a byproduct of execution. Cogward produces two records, because no single artifact serves both an SRE mid-incident and an auditor a year later.
For engineering, SRE, security operations, and cost analysis. A normalised event stream for every run, exportable into the tools teams already use.
For security review, risk, audit, and compliance. Tamper-evident, tenant-scoped, independently verifiable, attributable, and exportable, with sensitive payloads referenced by hash rather than copied out.
Each record carries the identity, version, policy, and approval context resolved at the execution boundary, so it ties back to the exact trajectory it describes.
Once every production run passes through the same runtime, it holds a vantage no standalone monitoring tool occupies: it sees identity, declared purpose, lifecycle state, policy, and outcome together, for every agent, version, tenant, and run. Evaluation runs over the trajectories production actually creates, and its verdicts feed the same lifecycle authority operators exercise directly.
Goal achievement, tool-use patterns, escalation and policy-denial rates, looping, cost per outcome, tenant-specific behavior, version regression, and behavioral drift, scored against per-tenant and per-version baselines, without a code deployment.
Release gate, policy change, tenant containment, version rollback, or a new governed version. Authority to promote or materially change production behavior stays behind explicit policy and human approval.
A point observability tool sees the infrastructure an agent ran on; the runtime sees whether the agent is still doing what it was registered to do.
The governed agent lifecycle
Cogward does not replace your framework, model, identity provider, policy engine, observability platform, or SIEM. It supplies the shared runtime context and execution boundary that lets them participate consistently in agent production.
Review runtime, identity, policy, evaluation, lifecycle, evidence, and deployment capabilities, including what is available today, in preview, and planned.
Bring an agent, its deployment target, and the production questions your customers or security team are asking. We will walk through the runtime, control boundary, deployment model, and evidence architecture.