Why AI Agents Need Governance, Not Just Orchestration
We've been running multi-agent AI systems in production for months. Not demos. Not proofs of concept. Real agents writing real code, managing real infrastructure, making real decisions.
The hardest problem wasn't getting them to work. It was getting them to work accountably.
Every multi-agent framework on the market solves the same problem: how do agents talk to each other? How do you route tasks? How do you chain outputs? Orchestration. And orchestration is necessary. But it's not sufficient.
Here's what orchestration doesn't answer: When Agent A deploys code to production, who authorized that? When Agent B modifies a database schema, what scope was it operating under? When Agent C delegates a task to Agent D, did it have permission to delegate?
In most systems, the answer is: if the agent can reach the tool, it can use it. There's no scoped permission. No delegation chain. No audit trail. The agent's authority is determined by its access, not by any explicit grant.
This is the ambient authority problem. And it's fine when agents are writing markdown summaries. It's not fine when they're touching production infrastructure.
We needed something different. Not another orchestration layer. A governance layer. Something that defines what agents are allowed to do, not just what they're able to do.
That's why we started building PACT5.