Your AI agents are one bad request away.

From a compliance violation. A data breach. A six-figure cloud bill.

Altrace is the control plane for AI agent authority. What they can access, what they can spend, what they can do — enforced at the infrastructure layer. In Kubernetes, agents have no route around it. And every decision is recorded.

Altrace governance animation — an AI agent request is intercepted, evaluated, and governed
17.2x
Error amplification in multi-agent systems
DeepMind, 2024
Aug 2, 2026
EU AI Act Art. 14 deadline for mandatory human oversight
Regulation (EU) 2024/1689
<1ms
New-request block latency in Kubernetes deployments
Kubernetes deployments

Multi-agent systems amplify errors. Governance shrinks them.

Runaway Spend

An agent hits a loop, burns through your LLM budget in minutes. Without cost governance, there's no circuit breaker — just a bill.

Authority Escalation

A worker agent inherits its orchestrator's full authority. One delegation mistake, and a subordinate agent can access models and tools it was never meant to touch.

Audit Gap

When something goes wrong, you need to know what happened, which agent did it, and why the system allowed it. Prompt logs don't answer those questions.

Most teams are stuck choosing between bad options

Prompt Guardrails

Instructions to the model, not enforcement. A jailbroken, confused, or creatively autonomous agent ignores them. They're suggestions — not controls.

Manual Review

Doesn't scale. If you're running 50 agents making hundreds of LLM calls per hour, a human in the loop becomes a human in the way.

Do Nothing

Wait until a breach, a compliance finding, or a runaway agent makes the decision for you. By then, the damage is done.

There's a fourth option.

Altrace

How Altrace Works

Cut LLM access for any agent within 1.2 seconds

In Kubernetes deployments, one API call blocks all new LLM requests for a team or individual agent. The kill switch is enforced at the network layer — the agent process has no route to bypass it. Kill state persists through restarts and power loss.

Maximum cost overrun bounded to $100 worst-case, regardless of agent behavior.
altrace — kill-switch.log
14:23:01 KILL agent=data-pipeline-worker-3
14:23:01 INFO reason=budget_hard_limit_exceeded
14:23:01 BLOCK new_requests=dropped latency=0.4ms
14:23:02 BLOCK active_tunnels=terminated latency=1.1s
14:23:02 INFO state=persisted notify=slack,pagerduty
14:23:02 WARN in_flight=3 requests completing max_overrun=$6.00

Authority can only shrink, never grow

When an orchestrator delegates to a worker agent, Altrace enforces that the worker's authority is a strict subset of what it was granted. Budget, model access, tool permissions, data classification — all attenuated through delegation contracts. This is mathematically enforced, not policy-enforced.

Authority flows down, never escalates. Enforced at the infrastructure layer, not by prompt.
Operator
gpt-4o claude-sonnet $500/day tools: all
attenuates to
Orchestrator
gpt-4o claude-sonnet $200/day tools: search, db-read
attenuates to
Worker
gpt-4o claude-sonnet $50/day tools: search

Every enforcement decision recorded and attributable

Altrace records every governance decision in a tamper-evident audit log. Request ID, agent identity, which stage in the decision chain produced the result, and the machine-readable reason code. When an auditor asks what happened, you have the answer — with causal context, not just timestamps.

altrace — audit.log
14:22:58 ALLOW research-agent-1 model=gpt-4o cost=$0.032
14:22:59 ALLOW research-agent-1 model=gpt-4o cost=$0.028
14:23:00 BLOCK data-pipeline-worker-3 model=claude-opus
                   reason=model_not_in_allowlist
14:23:01 WARN data-pipeline-worker-3 budget=$198.40/$200.00
14:23:01 BLOCK data-pipeline-worker-3 reason=budget_soft_limit

When an agent violates policy, your team knows immediately.

Altrace fires a structured alert to Slack with full context — agent ID, violation reason, affected budget, and a one-click kill switch. No log diving. No incident post-mortem at 2am.

#altrace-alerts
A
Altrace 2:23 PM
Agent: data-pipeline-worker-3
Violation: budget_hard_limit_exceeded
Spend: $204.20 / $200.00 limit
Action: Kill switch activated
View Details Confirm Kill

Built for the Regulatory Moment

🏛

EU AI Act Art. 14

Human oversight enforcement with machine-readable decision reasons

🔒

NIST SP 800-53

Access control and security attribute governance

🏥

HIPAA / PCI DSS

Content-blind governance — your data never leaves your infrastructure

SOC 2 Type II

In progress

Ready to govern your agents?

Request early access. We're onboarding a limited number of enterprise teams.

We respond within 24 hours.