Red Hat has launched asago, which stands for AI Safety And Governance Orchestration. It is an open-source community project that automatically translates AI governance policies into secure, production-ready AI systems. The project connects the separate steps performed by engineering and compliance teams into a single, auditable workflow.
asago aims to translate complex corporate and regulatory AI policies into concrete operational controls via a standardized open-source platform. This is done in four steps: risk mapping, risk assessment, risk mitigation, and production deployment.
In the first step, the framework automatically parses uploaded governance policies. It links an organization’s requirements to established risk frameworks such as the NIST AI RMF, the OWASP LLM Top 10, and the EU AI Act, via the IBM AI Risk Atlas. Next, asago generates use-case-specific test scenarios, recommends guardrails, and orchestrates the controls into deployment-ready configurations for environments such as hybrid cloud and Kubernetes.
Each step produces a continuous audit trail. This links individual policy clauses directly to tests and runtime controls, so reviewers can see exactly which risk each action addresses.
“As organizations transition from experimental AI pilots to long-running, autonomous agents, establishing clear operational guardrails becomes a critical infrastructure requirement,” says Steven Huels, vice president of AI Engineering at Red Hat.
Collaboration
The project is released under the Apache License 2.0 and provides declarative configurations for Kubernetes, Terraform, and Ansible. In addition to Red Hat, contributors to asago include Brave Software, IBM Research, Microsoft, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NVIDIA, and The Alan Turing Institute.
asago is currently in the project formation phase. Developers, researchers, and early adopters can view the repository and participate in governance via GitHub. “We encourage more collaborators to join this community driven effort,” said Stuart Battersby, AI safety and model evaluation architect at Red Hat.
Tip: IBM and Red Hat are expanding Lightwell with services for the open-source ecosystem