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COMPEL Glossary / policy-engine

Policy engine

A declarative rule engine that gates agent actions — via ABAC-style policies evaluating identity, resource, environment, and action attributes.

What this means in practice

Open-source references include Open Policy Agent (OPA) and AWS Cedar; placing the policy engine outside the prompt ensures that policy changes flow through code review rather than prompt edits.

Synonyms

agent policy engine , ABAC policy engine

See also

  • Agentic platform — A shared enterprise platform providing agent runtime, tool registry, memory stores, safety layer, observability, and evaluation — so individual agentic use cases inherit these components rather than build them.
  • Orchestration plane — The layer of an AI system that coordinates prompts, retrievals, tool calls, safety filters, and routing between the user and one or more models.

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