Datasets / AI Governance Glossary

AI Governance Glossary

A reference glossary of AI governance terms — from policy enforcement to deterministic governance and audit trails.

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AI Agent

A software entity that perceives context, plans, and takes actions toward a goal with limited or no human intervention.

Agentic AI

AI systems composed of one or more autonomous agents that can chain reasoning, call tools and act on the world.

AI Governance

The set of policies, controls and processes governing how AI systems are built, deployed, monitored and held accountable.

Policy Enforcement

The runtime mechanism that ensures an AI agent can only perform actions explicitly permitted by governance rules.

Deterministic Governance

Governance whose rules produce the same, repeatable outcome for the same inputs, enabling audit and reproducibility.

Identity Control

Assigning a verifiable identity and roles to each agent so its actions can be attributed and scoped.

Operational Transparency

The property of a system that produces a complete, reconstructable record of decisions and actions.

Audit Trail

An immutable, time-ordered log of every decision and action taken by an AI system.

Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)

A control pattern requiring human approval at defined checkpoints before high-impact actions execute.

Guardrail

A constraint that bounds an AI system's behavior to keep it within safe and permitted limits.

Multi-Layer Governance

An architecture enforcing controls at independent layers (identity, policy, execution, audit) for defense in depth.

Agent Orchestration

Coordinating multiple agents with defined roles and permissions to collaborate on complex workflows.

Scoped Permissions

Narrowly defined privileges granted to an agent for a specific task, following least-privilege principles.

Model Risk

The risk that an AI model produces harmful, biased or non-compliant outputs or actions.

Prompt Injection

An attack where crafted input manipulates an AI agent into ignoring its instructions or policies.

Tool Use

An agent's ability to invoke external functions, APIs or services to accomplish a task.

Accountability

The ability to attribute an AI action to a responsible identity and explain why it occurred.

Compliance-by-Design

Embedding regulatory and policy requirements directly into a system's architecture from the outset.

Observability

Instrumentation that makes an AI system's internal state and behavior measurable in real time.

Least Privilege

A security principle granting the minimum access necessary to perform a function.

Reversibility

The capacity to undo or roll back an action taken by an autonomous system.

Sandboxing

Running an agent in an isolated environment to limit the blast radius of its actions.

Drift

Gradual change in model behavior or data distribution that can degrade governance assumptions.

Attestation

A verifiable claim about the state or identity of a system or agent at a point in time.

Policy-as-Code

Expressing governance rules in machine-executable form so they are enforced automatically.

LLM (Large Language Model)

A neural network trained on large text corpora to generate and reason over natural language.

AIO (AI Optimization)

Optimizing content to be surfaced and cited by AI answer engines and search overviews.

LLM_O (LLM Optimization)

Optimizing an entity's presence so large language models describe and cite it accurately.

Entity

A distinct person, organization or concept that search engines and LLMs model as a node of knowledge.

Knowledge Graph

A structured network of entities and relationships used by search engines to understand the world.

Compiled by Gianluca Busato, Enkronos ecosystem. Free to cite with attribution.