Every agent becomes a writer
Without candidate-first controls, autonomous writes turn shared memory into an unreviewed source of truth.
Infrastructure for the agent economy
Memory engines retrieve. Vault decides what can be trusted.
A backend-agnostic governance foundation for agent memory—approval, access, freshness, expiry, privacy, provenance, and rollback—without forcing teams to replace mem0, Letta, AgentMemory, RAG, or their own stack.
Local-firstSQLite + Markdown source of truth
Backend-agnosticStandalone or augment an engine
Governed by defaultCandidate → review → promotion
6 / 6valid top-1 cases with mem0 + Vault
0 / 6forbidden exposures after governance
+0.1482 msmean paired guard overhead
5 × clean-statedigest-bound sequential repeats
Published 2026-07-19 · synthetic retrieval-only governance contract · not end-to-end QA or an official vendor leaderboard.
The category
The missing control plane between retrieval and action.
Vector similarity answers “what looks relevant?” Production agents also need to know “is it approved, current, permitted, and traceable?”
Existing layer
Memory engines
Extract · embed · rank · retrieve
mem0
Letta / MemGPT
AgentMemory
Vector RAG
→
Vault Governance Contract
Trust decision
- Approval and lifecycle state
- Access and sensitivity policy
- Freshness, TTL, supersession
- Privacy and secret blocking
- Provenance and audit trail
→
Agent-ready output
Governed memory
Allowed evidence
Block reasons
Source citations
Rollback path
Published evidence
Same engine. Same candidates. A measurable governance lift.
We compare A with A + Vault, not unrelated providers in a vanity leaderboard.
Valid Recall@1
Six synthetic governance cases · top-1 · higher is better
BaselineGoverned
Forbidden exposure
Share of cases returning invalid memory · lower is better
Why now
Agents are multiplying faster than memory trust infrastructure.
The strategic opportunity is not another isolated memory store. It is a portable governance contract across the agent stack.
Every framework becomes a silo
Teams need continuity across Codex, Claude, OpenClaw, n8n, Coze, and future runtimes—not another proprietary island.
Trust becomes infrastructure
Access, provenance, expiry, rollback, and audit are horizontal requirements. That is the platform layer Vault is designed to own.
Defensibility
A governance contract that survives backend churn.
Models, vector databases, and memory engines will change. The invariants around trusted memory remain.
Provider-neutral
One contract across local, self-hosted, cloud, and future managed backends.
Evidence-native
Bounded reads, citations, audit trails, digest-bound publication artifacts.
Lifecycle-aware
Promotion, expiry, supersession, archive, deletion, restore, and rollback.
Agent-native
MCP, Gateway, CLI, OpenAPI, and governed multi-host synchronization.
“Keep the memory engine you like. Add the foundation that decides what can be trusted and used.”
Build on governed memory.
Evaluate the architecture, reproduce the evidence, or integrate your memory engine.