Red Hat has announced the formation of asago, an open source community project intended to automate how AI governance policies become product-ready, safely-deployed AI systems. The project connects fragmented steps, tools, and requirements of engineering and compliance teams to create an automated, auditable, and traceable workflow, bringing together industry leaders including Red Hat, IBM Research, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and academic institutions.
Red Hat launches asago open source project for AI safety and governance automation.
Maps regulatory policies to risk frameworks including NIST AI RMF, OWASP LLM Top 10, and EU AI Act.
Automates risk assessment, mitigation recommendations, and production deployment configurations.
Founding partners include IBM Research, Microsoft, NVIDIA, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and The Alan Turing Institute.
Provides continuous audit trail tying policy clauses to tests and runtime controls.
Infrastructure-agnostic with outputs for Kubernetes, Terraform, and Ansible configurations.
Translating abstract policy guidelines into functional software configurations slows AI innovation and introduces risk from human miscommunication. Compliance officers require rigorous risk assessments and verifiable evidence, while platform engineers need structured configurations maintainable within DevOps and GitOps workflows. As regulations like the EU AI Act take effect, organizations cannot risk stalling innovation or creating unmonitored shadow AI deployments. asago intends to resolve this friction by providing a single, open standard that compliance teams, data scientists, and infrastructure administrators can converge upon.
asago uses a standardized open source platform to translate complex corporate and regulatory AI governance policies into operational controls across four primary stages. Risk mapping automatically reads and interprets uploaded policies, mapping requirements to frameworks like the NIST AI RMF, OWASP LLM Top 10, and EU AI Act via the IBM AI Risk Atlas. Risk assessment generates use-case specific scenarios for automated safety testing tailored to identified risks. Risk mitigation recommends safety guardrails based on testing with clear rationale and audit trail. Production deployment orchestrates recommended controls into deployment-ready configurations across hybrid cloud and Kubernetes, eliminating manual infrastructure coding.
The asago project unites industry leaders and academic institutions including Red Hat, Brave Software, EvalEval coalition, IBM Research, Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria, Microsoft, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, North Carolina State University, NVIDIA, and The Alan Turing Institute. The project integrates with best-in-class open tools and provides full, distributed trace capabilities that log evidence bases required by auditors to demonstrate compliance. Every control active in a production environment maps back to its explicit policy justification, establishing continuous verification for enterprise AI portfolios.
"As organizations transition from experimental AI pilots to long-running, autonomous agents, establishing clear operational guardrails becomes a critical infrastructure requirement," said Steven Huels, vice president, AI Engineering, Red Hat. "Through initiatives like Lightwell, we are working to secure the open source supply chain from AI-driven vulnerabilities. asago complements this effort and takes the next logical step for enterprise AI by automating the link between corporate policy definitions and live production agents. This gives enterprises the end-to-end operational confidence they need to scale trusted AI across the hybrid cloud."
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges.
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