financial_governance — Open standard for AI agent financial governance interfaces

A vendor-neutral specification for declarative financial governance in autonomous AI agent systems.

Overview

As AI agents gain the ability to initiate financial transactions autonomously, agent specifications need a typed interface for declaring runtime financial constraints. The financial_governance block fills this gap.

This standard defines:

• A declarative YAML configuration block for financial governance
• A payment event schema with three typed objects (payment_required, payment_approval, payment_receipt)
• Conformance requirements for compliant agent runtimes
• EU AI Act compliance guidance for payment approval audit trails

Origin

This standard emerged from community discussion in open-gitagent/gitagent issue #38, where the absence of a runtime financial enforcement interface in agent specs was independently identified and verified by contributors. The core proposal was endorsed as technically sound by that community.

It is consistent with the Agentic Commerce Protocol (OpenAI + Stripe), which defines how agents transact. The financial_governance block defines the governance layer that sits in front of those transactions.

Specification

See spec/financial_governance.md for the full RFC.

Example

financial_governance:
  enabled: true
  firewall: valkurai
  payment_schema_version: "1.0"

  spending:
    max_per_transaction_cents: 5000
    max_monthly_cents: 200000
    currency_default: USD
    allowed_categories:
      - software
      - api
      - saas
      - cloud

See examples/purchasing-agent/agent.yaml for a complete working example.

Reference Implementation

Valkurai is the reference implementation of this standard. It implements the three-gate architecture (identity, policy, deterministic rule engine with async LLM enrichment) described in the specification.

Any compliant financial firewall implementation may be referenced in the firewall field. The standard is intentionally vendor-neutral.

Status

v1.0 — Draft

Community feedback welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to propose additions.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.