Answer: The Catha Governance Cage is a model-independent control layer that acts as the company AI constitution: it defines authority, permissions, autonomy, approvals, evidence, monitoring and recovery for AI workflows.

What this means in practice

Authority

Defines who may request, approve, execute, change rules, grant exceptions, stop and restart a workflow.

Rules

Turns policies such as “do not send without approval” into explicit rules that a workflow and its test plan can reference.

Permissions

Separates what a system can technically access from what the business has authorized it to do.

Approval Gates

Puts mandatory human authorization in front of consequential external effects such as sending, publishing, purchasing or changing records.

Audit Evidence

Requires receipts and logs that make instructions, approvals, actions and results traceable.

Recovery

Defines how the business contains a failure, handles an unknown execution state and returns to safe operation.

A practical construction test

  1. Define the business outcome.
  2. Measure how the workflow performs today.
  3. Identify what AI is being asked to interpret or decide.
  4. Define what remains under human authority.
  5. Test with real examples and acceptance criteria.
  6. Measure results before expanding scale or autonomy.

Where governance fits

The AI model can change. The company’s operating rules should not change silently with it. Catha’s Governance Cage is designed to preserve the business authority layer above the model and workflow.