Trust in Depth: Giving agents more autonomy without losing control

This article introduces Trust in Depth, AWS's framework for enabling AI agents to operate autonomously while maintaining organizational control and safety through layered verification mechanisms.

• Scope agents to only required capabilities and tools before deployment using precise policies
• Assign unique identities to every agent and track all actions to specific authorization
• Enforce boundaries through policies at the AgentCore Gateway, preventing unauthorized actions regardless of agent behavior
• Observe and reconstruct agent actions using CloudWatch Omni to verify correctness and improve performance
• Use automated reasoning to mathematically prove policy compliance where rules can be precisely stated
• Combine content filtering, testing, monitoring, and temporal policies for layered defense

Trust in Depth enables organizations to safely delegate important work to AI agents by building verifiable confidence through independent, reinforcing control layers rather than requiring human approval for every action.