ActGov: Governing LLM Agent Actions via Policy-Constrained Validation

Kaiyuan Zhang, Yuke Peng, Ke Jiang, Yinqian Zhang

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute long-horizon workflows through external tools, allowing untrusted outputs to influence subsequent actions and exceed user authorization. Existing defenses isolate injected content or constrain execution with predefined plans and static policies, but these approaches are brittle under dynamic workflows and scale poorly across extensible tool ecosystems. In this work, we present ActGov, a runtime enforcement framework that validates each LLM-proposed tool action before it causes external effects. Built on a unified semantic model of authorization, actions, runtime context, and security constraints, the ActGov-Policy component iteratively constructs a policy set from tool specifications, benign tasks, and observed failure traces, with each update verified through SMT-based counterexample checking. At runtime, ActGov-Runtime abstracts each tool call into finite policy records and permits it only if it remains within the task-scoped authorization boundary and satisfies all applicable policies. This per-action enforcement preserves authorization throughout long-horizon, dynamically branching workflows. We evaluate ActGov on the…