Agent Governance Toolkit is a framework for controlling autonomous AI agents through policy enforcement, identity tracking, execution sandboxing, and reliability practices. Teams use it to decide which agent actions are allowed, identify agents in multi-agent systems, and keep records of decisions. The catalogue entries provide its instructions, commands, plugin, MCP server, and skill.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkitWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/agents-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.01640 | $0.01640 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00656 | $0.00656 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00328 | $0.00328 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00164 | $0.00164 |
Grade A, and why
agent-governance-toolkit AGENTS.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Agent Governance Toolkit - Repository Instructions
Project Overview
Agent Governance Toolkit is a multi-package OSS monorepo for runtime governance of AI agents: policy enforcement, zero-trust identity, execution sandboxing, SRE, compliance, examples, docs, demos, SDKs, and publishing pipelines.
Use this file for repository-wide routing. When you enter a subdirectory that has its own
AGENTS.md, that narrower file takes precedence.
Repository Layout Status
This routing reflects the repo as it exists today while reserving room for approved language
SDK migrations. Language SDKs may live in standalone top-level directories at the repository
root. For contributor routing, treat agent-governance-dotnet/, agent-governance-golang/, and
agent-governance-rust/ as the canonical standalone language homes.
Treat current paths as a point-in-time representation, not a permanent architecture promise. When a standalone top-level implementation exists for a language, changes for that language should go there rather than into the repo root or an older shared SDK path.
Where Changes Belong
| Area | Path | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Published Python packages | agent-governance-python/ |
First-party reusable Python packages and SDK surfaces meant for direct external consumption |
| Python runtime and product code | */ |
Runtime code, applications, policy engines, trust, SRE, compliance, and other Python product surfaces that have not moved into the standalone package home |
| Current shared SDK paths | agent-governance-python/agent-mesh/sdks/ |
Public SDK APIs and language-specific packaging that still live in the shared layout today |
| Standalone language implementations | agent-governance-python/, agent-governance-dotnet/, agent-governance-golang/, agent-governance-rust/, and other agent-governance-* siblings |
Top-level language-specific implementations at the repository root; use these as the canonical contributor-facing paths |
| Docs site | docs/ |
Reference docs, tutorials, architecture, package pages |
| Runnable examples | examples/ |
Self-contained integrations and worked examples |
| Interactive demos | examples/demos/ |
Live demos, dashboards, real-service walkthroughs |
| Release automation | .github/workflows/ |
GitHub Actions release, packaging, SBOM, provenance, and publishing automation |
| GitHub automation | .github/ |
CI, PR automation, issue templates, policy workflows |
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago First seen · 131 lines · 1,640 tokens per session scan A cc8e6b5cc19b
agent-governance-toolkit AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit (6,477 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 1,640 tokens to every session, about $0.0066 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other instructions, from other repositories
vscode buildNext.instructions.md
Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).
next.js AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for vercel/next.js, covering next.js development guide, codebase structure, monorepo overview, core package: packages/next and other important packages.
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.md
Instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code oss third-party-notices pipeline, architecture, pipeline flow in ci, cache eligibility and rollout and applying the notice (cutover).
langchain AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for langchain-ai/langchain, covering global development guidelines for the langchain monorepo, corridor security analysis, project architecture and context, monorepo structure and development tools & commands.
vscode copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code copilot instructions, project overview, root folders, core architecture (src/ folder) and built-in extensions (extensions/ folder).
deno copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for denoland/deno, covering deno development guide for github copilot, network access, high level overview, key directories and key files to understand first.