Assembled from parts, you get four trust roots. AGA carries all four guarantees under one.
Runtime AI governance needs four guarantees at once: provenance, policy, attestation, and ordering, anchored to a single trust root. Each mature tool was built to carry one or two of them. The question is not who has more features; it is what composing them costs you: four trust roots, four verifier procedures, and no single continuity chain.
| Category | Provenancewhere software came from | Policywhat is permitted | Attestationwhat ran | Orderingin what sequence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Sigstore / SLSA build provenance | ||||
Open Policy Agent (OPA) admission-time policy | ||||
RATS Attestation platform integrity | ||||
Certificate Transparency append-only ordering | ||||
Attested Governance Artifacts one trust root for all four |
Filled dot: full coverage. Open ring: partial. Dash: none.
Composing rows 1 through 4 produces four separate trust roots and four verifier procedures. AGA delivers all four guarantees on a single continuity chain by sealing hashes of the relevant inputs, and it composes with, rather than replaces, a dedicated build-provenance or platform-attestation system. What it does not deliver is a transparency log’s split-view detection: the checkpoint is signed inside the operator’s boundary, so a self-contained bundle cannot show that no second history was published to someone else. Where that matters, publish the checkpoint to an append-only log; AGA composes with one rather than replacing it.
Composing point tools yields four trust roots and four verifier procedures; AGA carries all four guarantees under a single continuity chain. The architecture is the subject of USPTO Application No. 19/433,835, pending.
Each one solves a real problem, and stops at a real boundary.
These are factual technical comparisons. Where the tools are complementary, we say so, and most of them are.
OPA / Rego
covers admission-time policy
It answers “is this permitted?” at a decision point but does not act on the decision at runtime, does not produce signed proof that governance occurred, and does not generate offline-verifiable evidence. Layer AGA on top for the sealed decision boundary and the tamper-evident receipt chain; effecting the decision is wired per deployment.
Sigstore / SLSA
covers build-time provenance
It proves an artifact was built and signed correctly before release, then its job is done. AGA operates after deployment: it produces a tamper-evident record of the running system's governance decisions and flags drift from the sealed baseline during execution. Sigstore covers the supply chain; AGA covers runtime. They compose.
Blockchain audit trails
covers append-only ordering via consensus
Consensus buys immutability at the cost of latency, expense, and an external infrastructure dependency that is impractical for real-time governance. AGA achieves tamper evidence through hash-linked receipts and Merkle proofs verifiable offline, with no chain, no network, and no consensus.
TEE / confidential computing
covers hardware-isolated execution
A TEE proves code ran in a protected enclave, but whether that code applied correct governance policy is a separate question, and its evidence stays bound to a hardware vendor. AGA evidence verifies anywhere with standard Ed25519 and SHA-256. A TEE can harden the gateway without replacing it.
Don't take the table's word for it.
Verify a real evidence bundle yourself, read the architecture, or get in touch about your deployment.