Concepts

Governance

Governance in QuoxCORE is not a tab or a report. It is the spine. Every agent action, tool call, approval decision, and budget enforcement is recorded as it happens — not reconstructed after the fact. The result is an evidence chain that an auditor can read without trusting the platform's own claims about itself.

The AOCL evidence chain

AOCL (Agent Orchestration Control Layers) is the 11-layer processing pipeline that every agent interaction passes through. Each layer emits an observation event: what was received, what decision was made, what was passed to the next layer. The full chain of events for a single interaction is visible in the AOCL waterfall view.

Observation events are written to the VOLT evidence ledger, which is an append-only, hash-linked structure. Each event references the SHA-256 hash of the previous event. Modifying a past event breaks the hash chain — the tampering is immediately detectable.

WARD witnesses publish checkpoint hashes to external backends (GitHub, GitLab, S3, TSA) so that the evidence exists independently of the QuoxCORE server. An auditor can verify the chain without access to the Quox system.

Four-scope cost budgets

Budget enforcement operates at four levels simultaneously. All four are enforced before an agent action is executed — not after.

OrganisationMonthly ceiling across all workflows, agents, and objectives in the org. The highest-level cap. Breaching it hard-stops all new executions until reset or raised.

ObjectiveBudget allocated to a single objective. Shared across all workflow runs that execute in service of that objective.

ExecutionBudget for one workflow run. Enforced at the workflow level. A run that breaches its execution budget is terminated, not paused.

IterationBudget for one turn of an agentic loop. Prevents runaway loops from consuming the execution budget in a single iteration.

When a budget is exhausted, the Costs tab in the workflow builder shows the exact breakdown: which agents, tools, and nodes consumed what. The Budget Dashboard on the Home view shows org-level burn in real time.

Budget enforcement and the hard-stop dialog are tier_b (Compliance Suite) features. Budget visibility — seeing what was spent — is available on all tiers.

Approval policies

An approval policy is a rule that determines when a workflow must pause and wait for a human decision. Policies are defined in the Approval Templates tab and applied to approval gate nodes in the workflow builder. When a gate is reached, the workflow pauses, an inbox item is created for the approving user, and execution resumes only after approval or rejection.

Ghost-render gates show the approval gate as a locked node in the builder canvas until the policy is configured. This prevents launching a workflow with an unenforced gate.

Approval policies are a tier_c (Developer Kit) feature.

ET-ENFORCE and multi-tenant isolation

ET-ENFORCE is the enforcement tier that guarantees tenant isolation. Every AOCL event, budget record, Crystal, and approval decision is scoped to an org_id. No event from org A is readable by org B — even at the database level. The ET-ENFORCE test suite covers 12 error codes and runs as part of every CI build.

HITL inbox routing is part of the multi-tenant guarantee: inbox items created by workflow executions are routed to the org that owns the workflow, not to a default fallback. The HITL-ORGID-PLUMB fix in P8.F closed the last gap in this path.

Audit trail export

The Compliance Suite provides scheduled and on-demand audit export. The export includes the VOLT event chain, AOCL observations, approval decisions, and budget events for a configurable time window. Exports are formatted for SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001 evidence bundles. The Auditor Portal surfaces these exports with PBC auto-match so external auditors can verify evidence without needing a QuoxCORE account.