What is Agent Conformance Checking?

Agent Conformance Checking verifies whether an autonomously acting AI agent stayed within the process, role, and policy boundaries defined for it. The agent’s actual behavior is compared against a target model – analogous to classic Conformance Checking, but with the agent as the acting party. Deviations such as disallowed tool calls, skipped approvals, or actions outside its mandate become visible.

Why does this matter?

As autonomy increases, the accountability question shifts: not only humans but also agents must be able to demonstrate that they acted in compliance. Regulatory requirements such as the EU AI Act demand traceability and logging – Agent Conformance Checking provides the auditable basis for this.

What does this look like in practice?

An agent may approve orders up to €2,500 and only prepare anything above. The comparison surfaces three cases where it approved an order of €3,100 because a field was empty and it read the amount as 0. The breach is documented with timestamp, case and trigger.

Not to be confused with

Not to be confused with guardrails, which block an action at the moment of execution. Conformance checking examines afterwards what actually happened — the two complement each other rather than substitute for one another.