AI governance

Agents in Docker Sandboxes work on their own. They install packages, call APIs, and use tools without asking you first. Governance lets an agent work freely within rules that limit what it can access. The rules are enforced outside the sandbox, so the agent can't change or bypass them. They come from three sources: your local policy, the kits your sandboxes use, and your organization.

Note

This section covers sandboxes that run on your machine. Cloud sandboxes use the same kinds of allow and deny rules, but they don't use local policy or organization policy. They use cloud network policy, which is stored in your Docker account and managed with sbx --cloud policy or in the Docker Agentic Platform Console.

Where the rules come from

You set your local policy and choose which kits your sandboxes use. Your organization's administrators set its organization policies.

Local policy and kits

With local policy, you decide which network destinations your sandboxes can reach. You start from a preset, then use sbx policy to allow what your work needs and block what sandboxes shouldn't reach.

Kits, including the built-in agent kits, bring rules of their own. Whoever authors a kit defines the rules its agent needs, such as access to the agent's API, and the rules come with the kit whether you build it yourself or pull it from a registry or Git repository. They apply only to the sandboxes that use the kit.

Organization governance

If your organization has an AI Governance plan, administrators set rules centrally with organization governance. Their policies apply to the sandboxes of licensed members and go beyond the network, controlling which host paths sandboxes can mount and which MCP servers they can use. Administrators then review the decisions those policies make in audit logs.

Get started

If you're a developer, start with Try out local policy, an example that allows and blocks destinations for one sandbox.

If you're an administrator, start with Get started with organization governance to set up policies, audit logs, licenses, sign-in enforcement, and Docker Sandboxes for your organization.