Brain API: An Intent-Aware Control Plane for Policy-Governed Agentic Systems

Abstract

Contemporary cloud and distributed systems expose control through resource-centric abstractions: services, deployments, network flows, execution graphs. Agentic and tool-augmented systems have meanwhile shifted application logic toward intent-driven, adaptive execution. Existing control planes, workflow engines and service meshes lack abstractions for intent-level decision governance: they cannot represent high-level goals as first-class control objects, cannot enforce policy over the mapping from intent to execution plan, and cannot produce auditable records of why one execution path was chosen over its alternatives. Control logic is therefore embedded in application code, leaving systems brittle, opaque and hard to govern. We propose Brain API, an intent-aware control plane for policy-governed agentic systems. Its central contribution is the decision artifact: a durable, versioned, auditable record of how an intent became an executable plan, capturing which policies applied, which capabilities were evaluated, which alternatives were rejected, and why. A motivating use case is agentic datasets: datasets participating as policy-governed capabilities under residency, compliance and cost constraints. We evaluate a prototype of the decision layer against two external policy corpora we did not author. On the OPA Gatekeeper constraint library it agrees with the library's own published verdicts on 42 of 42 encodable cases, 19 admit and 23 deny. On Cedar example policies, labeled by differential testing against its reference implementation, a deliberately dissimilar domain exposed three defects in our model, including a default-allow assumption that would have inverted every authorization policy. The evaluation covers policy filtering and selection; context-signal and ranking remain design claims, and decision latency under load is unquantified.