AI Agent Controllability: Check Before The Agent Acts

Most companies still find out what their AI agents did by reading a log after the fact. Stephen Forte explains controllability: a check that runs before the agent acts and can say no, five working guidelines, and a trend in which Mistral and ANZ are building the same kind of controls. In this episode: Controllability defined. A check that runs before the agent acts and decides whether the action is allowed. If the check says no, the action does not happen. A log afterward is not controllability. Anthropic inference hooks. Now generally available on Claude Enterprise. Before Claude answers a prompt or runs a tool call, your company's security or data loss prevention server gets an allow or deny vote, inside Claude's infrastructure. One setup covers chat, Claude Code, Cowork, and connected tools. This is an architecture lesson, not a buying recommendation. Five working guidelines. A check before the agent acts. Short-lived credentials, with tokens that expire in minutes. Memory, ledgers, rules, and procedures kept outside the tool in files you own. Subject experts own the workflow, and a human stays accountable for high-stakes outcomes. Retest after every vendor or model update, and keep a dependency inventory. Four CISO questions. What untrusted content the agent reads, what it can do and on whose identity, the blast radius if it goes wrong, and whether you can see its actions in your logs. Least agency means the narrowest capability that still finishes the job. Mistral Studio. Workflows with human approvals are generally available. Managed agents are in public preview. OpenTelemetry traces show model calls, tool use, and approvals. Private cloud and on-premises timing for the new pieces is reported as expected by late November, not as something already shipped. ANZ Control Plane. CEO Nuno Matos told investors the bank is building an Enterprise AI Control Plane for visibility and technical control, with defined limits and a way to stop activity outside those limits. Humans must remain in control. Lightning item. Anthropic's incident response agent stayed inside human review when a newer model started reaching out to another agent mid-incident, because the write surface was bounded. Design the check for where the model will be in six months. Sources: Anthropic: Claude Enterprise security updates, inference hooks generally available Anthropic Help Center: Inference hooks overview Anthropic platform docs: Inference hooks Anthropic: CISO guide to agentic AI Anthropic: Applying Zero Trust to agentic AI services Mistral: Mistral Studio announcement Mistral: Release notes, Managed Agents public preview ANZ: CEO Nuno Matos FY26 investor remarks The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.