EU AI Act  ·  ISO/IEC 42001  ·  MCP Native

The Compliance Guardrail Your
AI Agent Fleet Cannot Operate Without

Aegis Guard Gateway is a real-time Model Context Protocol interceptor that classifies every tool call against 21 pre-mapped EU AI Act rules — deterministically, before the request executes, with a tamper-evident audit trail signed for every jurisdiction your DPO cares about.

21 EU AI Act rules pre-mapped at deployment
Zero-config ISO 42001 Annex A control tagging
Single decorator. No agent rewrite required.
HMAC-SHA256 audit records, SIEM-ready
tools/your_enterprise_tool.py python
# Before Aegis Guard — opaque, unaudited, non-compliant
@mcp.tool()
async def screen_candidates(payload: dict) -> dict:
    return hiring_pipeline.evaluate(payload)

# ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
# After — one import, one decorator. Full EU AI Act Article 6 coverage.
from aegis_guard import compliance_gate

@mcp.tool()
@compliance_gate        # ← intercepts, classifies, blocks, and signs — in < 2ms
async def screen_candidates(payload: dict) -> dict:
    return hiring_pipeline.evaluate(payload)

# Every call now produces a signed AuditRecord:
# {
#   "risk_tier": "HIGH_RISK",  "article": "Article 6 + Annex III §4",
#   "iso_controls": ["A.6.1.2", "A.9.2"],  "is_blocked": true,
#   "hmac_sha256": "a3f8…c91d",  "confidence": 0.95
# }
21 EU AI Act Rules Pre-Mapped
4 Scoring Dimensions Per Evaluation
ISO 42001 Annex A Controls Auto-Tagged
< 2ms Median Classification Latency
The Compliance Gap

Your AI agents are making consequential decisions.
Today, nobody can prove they shouldn't have.

The EU AI Act came into force in August 2024. Full enforcement for high-risk systems begins in 2026. Every automated decision touching employment, credit, healthcare access, or biometric data is now a regulated event — whether your legal team knows the tool exists or not.

🚫

Article 5 Violations Are Invisible Until They Are Front-Page News

Subliminal manipulation, social scoring, real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces — Article 5 prohibited uses are absolute bans with fines up to €35M or 7% of global turnover. Without interception at the protocol layer, your agents may already be crossing these lines.

⚖️

High-Risk Annex III Systems Require Explainable, Auditable Decisions

CV screening, credit scoring, student assessment, law enforcement analytics — eight Annex III categories require full documentation of AI decision logic. A log file is not an audit trail. A JSONL record without cryptographic integrity proof is inadmissible evidence of compliance.

🔍

Regulators Are Moving to Automated Discovery

The EU AI Office is building tool-call-level inspection capability. MCP and agent frameworks are specifically in scope. "We didn't know the tool existed" is not a viable defence when your model context protocol server is actively running high-risk classification pipelines.

🔐

ISO 42001 Requires a Documented AI Management System

Enterprise certification programmes increasingly require ISO/IEC 42001 conformance. Annex A mandates explicit control mappings for AI risk (A.6.1), governance (A.9.2), and operational monitoring (A.10.1). Manual mapping exercises become instantly stale when your agent fleet evolves weekly.

🛡️

Aegis Guard Gateway: Compliance at the Protocol Layer

Rather than auditing outputs after the fact, Aegis Guard intercepts every JSON-RPC tool call at the Model Context Protocol transport seam — before execution — classifying the intent, blocking prohibited operations, and writing a cryptographically signed audit record in a single atomic operation. Your compliance posture is enforced, not reported.

Prevent, not detect. Hard blocks on PROHIBITED-tier operations execute before the downstream tool function runs. No clean-up logic. No post-hoc remediation.

Evidence-grade audit records. Every evaluation produces an HMAC-SHA256 signed record suitable for regulatory submission, e-discovery, and DPO review cycles.

Continuous, automatic ISO 42001 mapping. Annex A control IDs are injected into every audit record without configuration — your AI Management System documentation stays current by default.

Technical Architecture

Four layers that make
a legally defensible compliance system

01 / 04

The Real-Time JSON-RPC Interceptor Layer

Aegis Guard inserts itself at the Model Context Protocol transport seam using a single @compliance_gate decorator. Every tools/call JSON-RPC request is intercepted before Python execution begins. Tool name, all key paths, all nested values, and semantic conjunctions are extracted as structured signal vectors.

Existing agent implementations require no modification to business logic. One import and one decorator instruments an entire MCP server in under five minutes. The interceptor is deployed in your environment — no traffic leaves your perimeter.

@compliance_gate JSON-RPC 2.0 In-process Zero agent rewrite FastMCP native
JSON-RPC Interception Flow

LLM Client Issues tools/call

Claude Desktop / OpenAI / custom agent sends JSON-RPC request to your MCP server.

{"method": "tools/call", "params": {...}}

@compliance_gate Intercepts

Payload is extracted before the decorated tool function is invoked. Execution is suspended pending classification.

_extract_all_text(payload) → signals

21-Rule Engine Evaluates

All rules evaluated in-process. PROHIBITED tier triggers an immediate block before any downstream I/O occurs.

_run_all_rules(tool_name, payload)

Signed Audit Record Written

HMAC-SHA256 record appended to append-only JSONL log. Optionally forwarded to SIEM via HTTPS webhook.

AuditRecord.from_compliance_result()
02 / 04

Deterministic 4-Dimension
Risk Scoring Engine

Unlike probabilistic LLM-based classifiers, Aegis Guard uses a fully deterministic, explainable scoring model with four independent signal dimensions. Each dimension has a fixed maximum contribution weight, making every classification decision independently auditable and reproducible from the raw payload alone.

The engine evaluates all 21 EU AI Act rules simultaneously. Every rule match returns a ScoreBreakdown object logging each dimension's contribution, the pre-clamp total, and whether an exception pattern reduced the score — giving your legal team a mathematically verifiable explanation for every compliance decision.

TOOL_NAME_STRUCTURAL (+0.40) KEY_PATH_STRUCTURAL (+0.25) CONTENT (+0.20) CONJUNCTION (+0.50) EXCEPTION (−0.30)
ScoreBreakdown — PROH-ART5-1D PROHIBITED
TOOL_NAME_STRUCT
+0.40
KEY_PATH_STRUCT
+0.25
CONTENT
+0.20
CONJUNCTION
+0.50
EXCEPTION
0.00
Pre-clamp total → Final confidence
1.35 → 1.00 BLOCK
ScoreBreakdown — HIGH-A3-S4-EMPLOY HIGH RISK
TOOL_NAME_STRUCT
+0.40
CONJUNCTION
+0.50
Final confidence
0.90 FLAGGED
03 / 04

Tamper-Evident Audit Trail
with ISO 42001 Annex A Mapping

Every compliance evaluation — whether it results in a block, a flag, or a clean pass — generates an AuditRecord sealed with HMAC-SHA256 using a 32-byte minimum secret. The hash covers the canonical serialisation of the full record, making any post-hoc tampering immediately detectable.

Each record auto-tags the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 Annex A controls that the flagged behaviour violates. Control IDs follow the standard's hierarchical format (A.6.1.2, A.9.2, A.10.1) and are written directly into the record — giving your AI Management System documentation live, continuously-updated evidence of control monitoring.

HMAC-SHA256 ISO 42001 Annex A Append-only JSONL SIEM webhook e-Discovery ready
audit.jsonl — record #4821
request_id req-8f3a-91cd-4e22
tool_name live_facial_recognition_cctv
action CALL_BLOCKED
risk_tier PROHIBITED
top_rule_id PROH-ART5-1D
article_ref Article 5(1)(d)
confidence 1.00
iso_42001_controls ["A.6.1.2", "A.9.2", "A.10.1"]
is_blocked true
timestamp 2026-06-13T10:31:46.218Z
hmac_sha256 a3f8c9d12e4b7f601a9c3d5e8f2b4a7c
9e1d3f5a7b2c4e6f8a0b1c3d5e7f9a1b

Auto-tagged Annex A controls

Written into every AuditRecord at evaluation time

A.6.1.2

AI risk assessment. Mandatory risk evaluation for high-impact AI operations

A.9.2

Human oversight. Controls for human review of AI-generated decisions

A.10.1

Operational monitoring. Continuous surveillance of AI system behaviour

A.5.3

Roles and responsibilities. Accountability chain for AI system outcomes

04 / 04

Configurable Per-Tier
Threshold Overrides

Every enterprise has a different risk tolerance. A financial institution subject to FCA scrutiny may need stricter detection than a research lab operating under academic exemptions. Aegis Guard's operator threshold system lets your CISO dial sensitivity per EU AI Act tier without touching a single rule definition.

Three environment variables — AEGIS_THRESHOLD_PROHIBITED, AEGIS_THRESHOLD_HIGH_RISK, and AEGIS_THRESHOLD_TRANSPARENCY — override the engine's per-rule confidence floor at runtime. Lower values increase recall (catch more borderline operations). Higher values reduce noise for trusted internal tooling. Production environments enforce a safety invariant: thresholds cannot be inverted, and observe-only mode for PROHIBITED operations is hard-blocked.

AEGIS_THRESHOLD_PROHIBITED AEGIS_THRESHOLD_HIGH_RISK AEGIS_THRESHOLD_TRANSPARENCY Production safety invariants
AegisSettings — Per-Tier Threshold Config
PROHIBITED AEGIS_THRESHOLD_PROHIBITED
0.50
HIGH RISK AEGIS_THRESHOLD_HIGH_RISK
0.45
TRANSPARENCY AEGIS_THRESHOLD_TRANSPARENCY
0.40
MINIMAL System default (immutable)
1.00
Production guard: PROHIBITED < TRANSPARENCY raises a hard ValidationError — inverted thresholds are rejected at startup.
AEGIS_ENV=production with block_prohibited_risk=false is rejected — observe-only mode cannot be silently enabled in production.
Pre-Mapped Rule Coverage

21 EU AI Act rules. Zero configuration.

Every rule shipped with Aegis Guard is pre-mapped to its governing Article, risk tier, and ISO 42001 Annex A controls. Your compliance team does not write detection logic. They configure thresholds and review evidence.

PROH-ART5-1A
Subliminal Manipulation
PROHIBITEDArt. 5(1)(a)
PROH-ART5-1B
Vulnerability Exploitation
PROHIBITEDArt. 5(1)(b)
PROH-ART5-1C
Social Scoring by Public Bodies
PROHIBITEDArt. 5(1)(c)
PROH-ART5-1D
Real-Time Remote Biometric ID (Public)
PROHIBITEDArt. 5(1)(d)
PROH-ART5-1E
Predictive Policing (Individual)
PROHIBITEDArt. 5(1)(e)
PROH-ART5-1F
Facial Recognition Data Scraping
PROHIBITEDArt. 5(1)(f)
HIGH-A3-S1-BMET
Biometric Categorisation
HIGH RISKAnnex III §1
HIGH-A3-S2-CRIT
Critical Infrastructure Management
HIGH RISKAnnex III §2
HIGH-A3-S3-EDUC
Educational Access Decisions
HIGH RISKAnnex III §3
HIGH-A3-S4-EMPLOY
Employment & Recruitment Scoring
HIGH RISKAnnex III §4
HIGH-A3-S5-SVCS
Essential Services Access (Credit)
HIGH RISKAnnex III §5
HIGH-A3-S6-LEF
Law Enforcement AI Systems
HIGH RISKAnnex III §6
HIGH-A3-S7-MIGR
Migration & Asylum Processing
HIGH RISKAnnex III §7
HIGH-A3-S8-JUST
Justice & Democratic Processes
HIGH RISKAnnex III §8
TRANS-ART50-1
Chatbot / Conversational AI Disclosure
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50(1)
TRANS-ART50-2
Deepfake Disclosure
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50(2)
TRANS-ART50-3
AI-Generated Text Labelling
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50(3)
TRANS-ART50-4A
Emotion Recognition Disclosure
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50(4a)
TRANS-ART50-4B
Biometric Categorisation Disclosure
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50(4b)
TRANS-ART50-S
Synthetic Media Watermarking
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50 Synthetic
TRANS-ART50-5
Recommendation System Disclosure
TRANSPARENCYArt. 50(5)
Regulatory Clock

The EU AI Act enforcement calendar is not negotiable

Your procurement cycle, your legal review cycle, and your engineering integration cycle all need to complete before the relevant enforcement date. Aegis Guard is designed to compress the integration timeline to days, not quarters.

AUGUST 2024 — IN FORCE
EU AI Act Enters into Force
The regulation became binding law across all 27 EU member states. Organisations operating AI systems in-scope have been under regulatory scrutiny since this date.
FEBRUARY 2025 — ACTIVE
Article 5 Prohibited Practices Enforceable
All 6 prohibited AI practices are now fully enforceable. Fines up to €35M or 7% of worldwide annual turnover. Biometric surveillance, social scoring, and subliminal manipulation bans are live.
AUGUST 2026 — APPROACHING
High-Risk System Requirements Enforceable
All Annex III high-risk systems — covering employment, credit, education, law enforcement, and biometrics — must demonstrate full Article 9 risk management, Article 12 logging, and Article 13 transparency compliance.
ONGOING
ISO/IEC 42001 Certification Pressure
Procurement frameworks in financial services, public sector, and critical infrastructure are beginning to require ISO 42001 conformance as a supply-chain condition. Live control evidence is the differentiator.
Next Step

Know exactly where your
AI fleet stands before a regulator does.

An Aegis Guard Architecture Review is a structured 90-minute session with our compliance engineering team. We map your current MCP server topology against EU AI Act Articles 5 and 6, identify the highest-priority integration points, and deliver a written risk assessment and deployment plan your General Counsel can sign off on.

Available for on-premise, VPC, and air-gapped deployments. NDA-protected review.  ·  Privacy Policy  ·  Security Overview

EU AI Act Regulation (EU) 2024/1689
ISO/IEC 42001:2023 Annex A
HMAC-SHA256 tamper-evident records
Model Context Protocol (MCP) native
On-premise · VPC · Air-gapped deployments