Govern the Runtime, Not the Agent: One Control Plane for Every Model, Every Harness

The industry is converging on a multi-agent, multi-model world. Teams are landing on a few facts at once: the best model changes every couple of months, it makes no economic sense to call a frontier model to classify a ticket, and your unique workflows may sometimes need custom models. So you end up running many models across many harnesses.

This makes trust the defining challenge of today. While harnesses do ship some guardrails, each one governs only its own traffic, and we are already seeing where that breaks down. Agents route around rails the harness cannot see, and the rails themselves shift underneath you whenever the model vendor ships an update. Safety cannot depend on the agent making the right decision, or on someone else’s release schedule.

Tushar Jain, CTO at Docker, makes the case for a meta-runtime: the layer below all your harnesses, covering agent execution, tool calls, credential usage, scoped permissions, token spend. A meta-runtime makes it possible to control and have visibility into all your agents, no matter what model or what harness.