Microsoft released the Agent Governance Toolkit (AGT) on April 2, 2026. I built Asqav, an open source Python SDK for the same problem space. They take fundamentally different approaches so here is an honest comparison.
What they share
Both tools exist because AI agents are being deployed without audit trails or governance. Both recognized that the EU AI Act enforcement deadline in August 2026 makes this urgent.
Architecture
Microsoft AGT is an enterprise policy management platform. It runs as a centralized service that manages agent permissions, monitors behavior, and enforces organizational policies. Think of it as an admin console for your agent fleet.
Asqav is a developer SDK. You pip install it, add a few lines of code, and every agent action gets a quantum-safe signature (ML-DSA-65) chained to the previous one. It runs at the code level, not the infrastructure level.
Enforcement model
Asqav provides three tiers of enforcement:
- Strong: the MCP server acts as a tool proxy. The agent calls tools through the proxy, which checks policy before forwarding. Non-bypassable.
- Bounded: gate_action is a pre-execution gate. The agent calls it before acting and the audit trail proves the check happened.
- Detectable: sign_action records what happened with hash-chained signatures. Tamper or omit an entry and the chain breaks.
Microsoft AGT focuses on policy management and monitoring. It does not produce cryptographic proof of what happened.
Cryptography
Asqav uses ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204), a quantum-safe signature algorithm. Every action is signed and hash-chained. An auditor can independently verify that the audit trail has not been modified.
Microsoft AGT uses standard authentication and authorization. No cryptographic signing of individual actions.
Integration
Asqav integrates directly with agent frameworks: LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents, Haystack, LiteLLM. Three lines of code.
Microsoft AGT integrates with Azure services and Microsoft's agent ecosystem.
Open source
Asqav is MIT licensed and fully open source. The SDK, MCP server, and CI/CD scanner are all on GitHub.
Microsoft AGT is open source under MIT as well, but designed for the Azure ecosystem.
When to use which
Use Microsoft AGT if you are running agents in Azure and need centralized policy management across a large organization.
Use Asqav if you need cryptographic proof of what your agents did, work with Python agent frameworks, or need to satisfy EU AI Act Article 12 tamper-evident logging requirements.
They are complementary, not competing. You could run AGT for policy management and Asqav for cryptographic audit trails.
Top comments (0)