Governance as Code — Policy That Executes, Not Just Advises
A governance policy written in a PDF is a suggestion; a policy written as code is a control. The difference between the two is the difference between hoping teams comply and knowing they do, because the policy runs automatically and blocks what violates it. Governance as code applies the lessons of infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code to AI governance — turning principles into executable, version-controlled, automatically-enforced checks. This post is about making governance something the system does, not something a document asks for.
A policy in a PDF is a suggestion; a policy as code is a control. Governance as code makes policy imperative — version-controlled, executable rules that run automatically at deploy, at runtime, and at registration, failing closed on what matters. What you can encode as gates, and what still needs human judgment.