In our first post, Cognous Keeps Your AI in Check, we introduced the scenario: a customer-service agent that pulls CRM records, drafts replies, and — if nobody's watching — occasionally sends 1,000 tone-deaf emails to your best clients. We said the fix isn't reading what the agent wrote after the fact. It's deciding, in advance, what the agent is even allowed to attempt.
That decision has to live somewhere. It can't live in a Slack thread, a comment in the agent's system prompt, or "Dave from platform remembers we blocked that." It needs to be a file — versioned, reviewable, and boring enough that a security team can actually sign off on it.
That's what Cognous's Open Control Stack is for. It's four small, open-source projects — Declare, Control, Replay, Evidence — that sit beside your agents and cover authorize, enforce, and prove. Declare comes first, and its artifact is the Agent Action Manifest. This post describes the Action Manifest tooling in the Open Control Stack, available on GitHub.
The Four Actions, Written Down
If you remember in post one, our AI agent was pulling customer data, drafted a cringey email, and sent it to our top 1,000 customers. The Action Manifest is used to outline the agent's permissions as declarations, to prevent this from ever happening again:
