From policy to production: Building trustworthy AI through open collaboration
As AI systems become more autonomous and increasingly embedded in critical decision-making, translating governance policies into practical, enforceable technical safeguards remains a major challenge. To help bridge this gap, Red Hat has launched the open source community project asago (AI Safety And Governance Orchestration) together with a coalition of partners.
An open framework for AI governance
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has formed asago, an open source community project designed to automate how AI governance policies become product-ready, safely deployed AI systems. The project brings together contributors from IBM Research, Microsoft, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Brave Software, North Carolina State University, Alquimia AI, EvalEval coalition, and Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U). Rather than treating governance as a separate compliance exercise, asago aims to embed AI safety and governance directly into the software development lifecycle.
“Developing trustworthy AI requires more than good intentions. It requires governance that can be implemented, verified and continuously maintained. asago was designed to help transform high-level policy into practical engineering workflows. IT:U has a strong background in both the technical and organizational governance of AI, which is why we’re grateful for the opportunity to contribute to asago. We hope it empowers organizations to innovate with confidence while making responsible AI development a practical reality.”
Ben Wagner, Professor of Human Rights and Technology at IT:U
What is asago?
asago uses a standardized open source platform and automated workflow to translate complex corporate and regulatory AI governance policies into actual operational controls. This aligns developer flexibility with operator governance across four primary stages:
- Risk mapping: The framework automatically reads and interprets uploaded AI governance policies, mapping an organization’s specific requirements directly to established AI Risk frameworks, ontologies and standards, such as the NIST AI RMF, OWASP LLM Top 10, EU AI Act via the IBM AI Risk Atlas – turning policy language into actionable risk profiles.
- Risk assessment: asago generates and executes use-case specific scenarios for automated safety testing tailored to identified risks, probing for harmful behaviors rather than relying solely on generic benchmarks.
- Risk mitigation: The project then recommends appropriate mitigations, including safety guardrails based on testing, creating a clear rationale and audit trail ready for review.
- Production deployment: asago then orchestrates recommended controls into deployment-ready configurations across platforms including hybrid cloud and Kubernetes, eliminating manual infrastructure coding.
Each of these steps produces a complete, continuous audit trail, tying individual policy clauses directly to tests and runtime controls, enabling reviewers to see exactly what risk each action addresses. This helps to transform AI safety into a predictable and governed enterprise utility.
Learn more and express interest in collaborating
The asago project is currently in its project formation phase. Developers, academic researchers, and enterprise early adopters can view the repository and participate in project governance via GitHub.
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. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.