Coverbase AI agent: controls, approvals and governance

This page is part of the User Guides collection and the Coverbase AI agent (Beta) set. It covers the controls on a run, Configuration > Coverbase AI Memory and the Coverbase AI rows in Configuration > Agent Ledger. It sits beside The Coverbase AI agent (Beta), the FAQ for approvers and administrators and Memory, permissions and standing agents.

Coverbase AI is in Beta. Your Coverbase team turns it on for your organization.

Coverbase AI is controlled in layers. It can only do what the person who started the run can do. Within that, it stops for approval at checkpoints, always asks before archives and actions that cannot be undone, and follows a policy your admins set for each kind of change. Every change it makes is in the run’s log, and changes to records are rows in the Agent Ledger with who asked and who decided. The mistake people make most often is assuming every change stops for approval. Changes you can undo in the product and that reach nobody, such as tagging a vendor, drafting follow-ups or changing a finding’s owner, run without a checkpoint. If your program needs a person to approve one of those, an admin sets it to Always asks. See Organization policies for each change.

The layers at a glance

Layer	What it controls	Who sets it
Turned on for the organization	Whether Coverbase AI exists in your organization at all	Your Coverbase team, during Beta
The person’s permissions	What a run can read and change	Your admins, through roles
Checkpoints	Which changes stop for approval by default	Built into each change
Always asks	Archives and actions that cannot be undone stop under every setting	Built in. Cannot be changed.
The run’s approval setting	Whether the checkpoints that can be undone stop: asks before writes, or Don’t stop to ask	The person, for each run
Approve all like this	Approves one checkpoint and every later call of the same change in that run	The person, at a checkpoint
Organization policies for each change	Applies on its own, Always asks or Off, for each change Coverbase AI can make	Admins, under Configuration > Coverbase AI Memory
Stop	Ends a run at its next step	The person
Standing agent limits	Runs per day, spend per day, quiet hours, pausing one or every agent	Admins, under Configuration > Coverbase AI Agents
Agent Ledger	The record of the changes to records, with who decided	Recorded automatically. Read and exported by anyone who can read organization settings.

Permissions: Coverbase AI acts as you

A run acts as the person who started it, with that person’s permissions at that moment. Runs work for active members with the Admin, Member or Siloed Member role. A run started by someone with another role, such as a custom role, Auxiliary Member or Guest, ends at its first step without doing anything, and so does a run whose person is no longer an active member.

Each step checks a permission. A step that needs a permission you do not hold is refused. The run says so in plain words and carries on with what it may do. It never looks for another way around the refusal.
Assigned records stay assigned. When your organization enforces roles and permissions and your role reaches only the records assigned to you, a run reaches only those records too. A record outside your reach is refused by its id, so a run cannot name another person’s record to get around the page.
Access is checked again on every step. Each turn rebuilds your identity from your current membership. A record you could open when the run started and have lost access to since is left out of the run’s context, and its tools refuse it.
Runs are private. Only the person who started a run sees it, answers it and steers it. A colleague who opens its link sees that it is not theirs.
Files and records you pick are checked. A record you add from the + menu must be one you can read in your organization. A file you attach must be one you uploaded.

What Coverbase AI changes without asking

Coverbase AI makes a change without stopping when the change can be undone in the product and reaches nobody outside your team. Examples:

Opening an intake request and drafting its answers
Creating a Radar detector or a workflow, turned off
Adding a dashboard from a template, saving a list view for you, exporting a list
Updating a vendor’s fields, tagging vendors, adding owners, setting a custom field
Changing a finding’s severity, owner or due date
Drafting follow-ups for the vendor, without sending them
Adding a note and notifying the colleagues it mentions
Acknowledging a Radar alert, moving a signal’s status
Adding a contract, updating an obligation, attaching evidence to a register entry
Marking your own work queue items done

Each one is a row in the Agent Ledger that reads Awaiting review until someone decides on it. To make any of them stop for approval, an admin sets it to Always asks.

Checkpoints

A checkpoint is a change that stops the run for your approval before it happens. The run’s status becomes Needs you, the top bar shows it on every page, and you are notified.

Kind of change	Examples	Why it asks
Starts work that costs time or a run	Launching an assessment or a Zero Touch run, cloning, rerunning or resuming an assessment, starting child runs	It runs evaluations and spends a run
Acts on its own from then on	Turning a Radar detector or a workflow on, changing what a detector watches, setting which vendors a questionnaire applies to	It will alert or act on people without being asked
Stops something people rely on	Turning a detector or a workflow off	People stop hearing about what it watched
Changes an assessment’s result	Marking a control’s outcome, marking many controls, correcting the vendor’s answer, taking a rerun’s result, completing an assessment	The score and the vendor’s record change
Assigns work or records a position	Raising a finding, adding an obligation, a register entry, a commitment, a screening disposition, a renewal decision, a review request	People are assigned work, or your organization’s position is recorded
Changes what every future assessment uses	Creating a control set, any change to a control set, creating a questionnaire, importing questions, a risk domain	Your organization carries it from then on
Admin configuration	Email and portal templates, tags, statuses, scales, reassessment rules, organization settings, assessment plans	It changes how Coverbase works for everyone
Designs you approve	A custom dashboard or custom charts	You approve the chart list before it is written
Radar triage	Dismissing an alert or alerts like it, opening a case, starting a reassessment, deciding a signal’s risk impact	The alert leaves the queue, or people are pulled into an investigation

What you can do at a checkpoint

Approve. The change happens and the run carries on. The ledger row reads Accepted with your name.
Not now, or type what to do instead. The change does not happen. The run reads your words and carries on with what it may do. The ledger records a Rejected row with what you typed as the note.
Approve all like this. Approves this change and every later call of the same change in this run, without stopping again. It is offered only on a checkpoint that can be undone and that your admins have not set to Always asks. You find it on the run page, on the Coverbase AI pill’s card, and on the Slack message. Each later change is recorded as approved by you.

Questions, batches and the inherent risk review

A question comes as a short menu, never a blank prompt, with the option Coverbase AI would pick marked Recommended. You can type your own answer.
A batch is one pause for many proposed changes, used when the run is in the background. Each item shows its change and reason with a tick box. Untick what you disagree with and click Apply, or Keep all as they are. A batch holds at most 50 items. An archive or an action that cannot be undone is never part of a batch.
The inherent risk review shows each risk domain with its proposed level, confidence, rationale and evidence. You agree or disagree per domain, move a level and say why, tick the assessments to run, and confirm. Only the levels you confirm are written to the vendor. The proposal and your changes both stay on the run.

Answering from outside the app

Only the person who started a run can answer it, wherever they answer from.

Where	How it works
Email	The needs-you email has one button per option. Each opens a page that asks you to confirm before it answers, because mail scanners open links. A link works once, only for its own question and person, and expires after 7 days. You can also reply to the email in your own words. A reply is taken only from your own address.
Slack	When your organization has Slack connected, a checkpoint reaches you in a direct message with one button per option. A checkpoint that can be undone also gets an Approve all like this button.
Microsoft Teams	When your Teams connection has interactive approvals on, a checkpoint with one approve option and one other option comes as an Approve and Decline card.

A batch, a question and the inherent risk review are answered in the app.

What always asks

An archive or an action that cannot be undone stops for approval under every setting. Don’t stop to ask, Approve all like this and organization policies cannot skip it. The checkpoint card says what will be lost, computed from the record and not written by the model, and its button carries the verb in the destructive style.

Always asks	What happens
Archiving a vendor	The vendor leaves every list with its assessments, documents and obligations
Archiving an assessment, or many at once	It leaves every list with its evaluations and the findings only it holds
Archiving an intake request, a control set, a workflow, a Radar detector, a dashboard, a finding, a vendor document, a questionnaire template, a portal template, a tag or a scale level	It leaves every list and report
Merging duplicate vendors or services	The duplicate’s records move to the one kept, and the duplicate is archived
Submitting an intake request	It lands in your reviewers’ queue
Approving, declining or sending back an intake request	The decision, or the requester is notified or emailed
Sending a request, a reminder, follow-ups or an email to a vendor	The vendor is emailed. It cannot be unsent.
Emailing a vendor from a Radar case	The vendor is emailed. It cannot be unsent.
Inviting a person to a vendor’s supplier portal	The person gets access
Reopening a submitted vendor request	The vendor can change what they submitted
Launching an assessment plan that contacts the vendor	The vendor is asked for documents or sent the questionnaire

The report of every run ends with What cannot be undone: each action of this kind the run took. Read it first after a background run.

Don’t stop to ask

Don’t stop to ask lets a run apply every checkpoint that can be undone without stopping. It is for batch work you have already decided to delegate.

Turn it on in the composer before you start, or on the run page of a live run. On a live run it applies from the next checkpoint. Turned on while the run waits on a checkpoint that can be undone, it approves that one too.
It never skips an archive or an action that cannot be undone, and never skips a change your admins set to Always asks. A change set to Off is refused either way.
Each change it applies reads Applied under org policy in the Agent Ledger.
A standing agent has the same setting, Ask before writes or Don’t stop to ask.

Organization policies for each change

Admins choose, for each change Coverbase AI can make, what happens. Open Configuration > Coverbase AI Memory and find What Coverbase AI May Do on Its Own. Changing a policy needs a role that can change organization settings.

Policy	What happens
Applies on its own (the default)	A checkpoint stops unless the run is set to Don’t stop to ask or you chose Approve all like this. A change without a checkpoint runs.
Always asks	The run stops and asks before this change under every setting, including changes that have no checkpoint of their own. Approve all like this is not offered.
Off	The run never makes this change. It says so, puts it in the report’s to-dos for the person, and carries on.

Archives and actions that cannot be undone show as Always asks and cannot be changed. Reads take no policy. A policy applies to every run in your organization, including standing agents.

Changes Coverbase AI never makes

Some changes are outside Coverbase AI whatever the setting:

Access and identity. It never changes roles, permissions, members, sign-in, SSO, IP allowlists, API keys or billing. It refuses in one sentence and points to Settings > Organization.
Accepting risk on its own. It never closes a finding or accepts its risk, never sets a register entry’s treatment to accept, and never accepts risk on a declined commitment. It records a control as risk accepted only when you or the evidence says your organization already accepted it, and that is a checkpoint.
Approving on its own. It approves an intake request, completes an assessment or records a Zero Touch decision only when you ask, and each of those is a checkpoint. Approving an intake request always asks. A Zero Touch decision never changes the vendor’s status.
Vendor responses. It never edits a vendor’s questionnaire response. A correction is recorded as your reviewer edit, and the vendor’s own answer is kept.
Other people’s settings. It changes your own notification settings only.
Hard deletes. It never deletes a record. It archives, and an admin restores an archived record from the archived view.
Records you did not name. It archives or turns off only the record you named, never a related one, and never more than you named. When a name matches several records, it asks which.
Modules not covered in Beta. RFPs, Inspect, risk scenarios, sending a contract for signature and allowlisting a screening match.

Stopping and steering a run

Stop on the run page or the top bar card ends the run. A run waiting on you stops at once. A working run stops within a few seconds, at its next step. Nothing more is written after that. What it already changed stays, and the plan shows which steps finished.
Tell Coverbase AI to change course, the box under a run, redirects it. A message while it waits on a checkpoint withdraws the checkpoint: the change is not made.
A finished run, including a stopped or failed one, takes a follow-up message and picks up with what it already knows.

Undoing a change

Changes you can undo are undone the way you would undo your own edit: on the record’s page. The report and the Agent Ledger link every record the run changed. There is no single button that reverses a whole run.
Archives are restored by an admin from the record’s archived view.
Actions that cannot be undone asked first, and the report lists them under What cannot be undone.
Mistakes teach. When you decline a checkpoint, untick a batch item or move a risk level and say why, Coverbase AI keeps a preference that later runs read. See Memory.

When a run is interrupted

A run that loses its server mid-step picks up where it stopped, and the run’s log says “Picked back up after an interruption.” It never repeats a change it already made: each change is checked against the Agent Ledger, and a change already recorded returns its earlier result. When nothing can prove whether a change landed, the run refuses to make it again and says in its report what to check and redo by hand. A run interrupted twice ends with a report saying so, and you are told.

The Agent Ledger

Coverbase AI records the changes it makes to records in the Agent Ledger under the agent Coverbase AI. Open Configuration > Agent Ledger.

Row	When	Human Decision
Changed a record for a Coverbase AI run	Each change, with the record it touched	Accepted by the person when they approved it at a checkpoint or in a batch. Applied under org policy under Don’t stop to ask. Awaiting review for a change without a checkpoint, so a reviewer can accept or reject it.
A declined change	Each checkpoint you declined and each batch item you unticked	Rejected by the person, with what they typed as the note
Ran a stretch of a Coverbase AI run	Each turn of the run, with the model calls behind it	None

Every row names the run and, for a standing agent, the agent. Filter the ledger to one run from the run page’s Agent Ledger link, or to one agent with View in Agent Ledger.
A change row is written in the same transaction as the change it records.
A few actions are recorded in the run’s log and report rather than as a change row: those that hand work to a background job (launching an assessment from a plan, rerunning one control, importing questionnaire questions, matching an intake request’s vendor, starting child runs) and two that touch only your own view (saving a personal list view, marking your notifications read).
Reading the ledger needs a role that can read organization settings. The ledger links back to a run only for the person who ran it, because a run page is private.
Export filtered for audit downloads up to 50,000 rows as a CSV.
Deleting a run does not delete its ledger rows.

Runs, history and exports

Action	What happens
Export on a run	Downloads the whole run as a file: the instruction, every step, what you answered and the report
Copy report	Copies the report as text
Archive a run	Moves a finished run out of your list. Stop a live run first.
Restore	Brings an archived run back
Delete permanently	Deletes an archived run and everything it said. Records it created stay, and its Agent Ledger rows stay. It cannot be undone.

Background runs and notifications

A run started in the background, from chat, from MCP or by a standing agent works without your browser. You are told when it needs you and when it is done.

Notification	When	Default
Needs you	A checkpoint, a question, a batch, the inherent risk review, or a failure	In-app and email on
Done	The report is ready	In-app and email on

A checkpoint, a question, a batch and the inherent risk review are sent at high priority, so they reach you at once even when your email is set to a daily digest. To get them in your digest instead, turn off Send urgent notifications immediately under your notification settings. That setting covers every urgent notification, not only Coverbase AI’s. When a run is about one vendor, each to-do in its report becomes an item in your work queue.

Standing agents

A standing agent starts runs on a schedule or when something happens. It acts as its owner, or as the person on duty in its group, with the same checkpoints, policies and ledger rows. Admins set it up under Configuration > Coverbase AI Agents with limits that ordinary runs do not have:

Playbooks it may use
Runs per Day and Spend Cap per Day
Quiet From and Quiet Until, which hold scheduled starts and notifications
Escalate After (Minutes), which moves an unanswered question to the next person on duty
Pause on one agent, and Pause every agent for all of them. Paused, nothing starts, and live runs stop before their next step.

A new agent starts turned off. See Standing agents.

Data handling

These statements are consistent with Coverbase’s AI governance and Data protection pages, which apply to Coverbase AI as to every AI feature.

Topic	How Coverbase AI handles it
Model	Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5 through AWS Bedrock in Coverbase’s AWS account. When Bedrock reports no capacity for it, the run falls back to Claude Sonnet 5.5.
Where inference runs	Bedrock’s cross-region inference can serve a request from an AWS region other than the one Coverbase runs in. See Data residency.
Training	Customer data sent to the models is not used to train them.
Model logs	Bedrock model-invocation logging records metadata only (model, timing, token counts), not prompt or response text.
What it reads	Records you can read, the record you started from, the records you pick, files you attach, your organization’s Coverbase AI memory, and public web results when a question reaches outside Coverbase.
Web search	Search queries go to an external web search provider (Tavily). A result counts only when it is about the vendor or subject in question, and the source is named.
Files you attach	Each file is uploaded to your organization as a document you uploaded, and the run reads its text. Text inside a file is treated as information, not as instructions, so a file that says “archive this vendor” does not make the run archive anything.
Redaction	When Redact personal data before model calls is on, it applies to Coverbase AI’s model calls. See Redacting personal data.
Tenant isolation	Runs, their logs and memory belong to your organization and are enforced like every other record. See Tenant isolation.
Memory	Preferences are kept for your organization only, in plain words built from your corrections, and admins edit, turn off or delete them.
Email	Emails to vendors and requesters go through the same sending path as the product’s pages, from your organization’s address.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to do
A run made a change nobody approved	It was a change you can undo with no checkpoint. Find it in the ledger (Awaiting review), undo it on the record if needed, and set that change to Always asks.
Approve all like this is missing	The checkpoint is an archive, an action that cannot be undone, or a change your admins set to Always asks.
Don’t stop to ask still stopped	The change is an archive, an action that cannot be undone, or set to Always asks.
A run says the organization turned a change off	An admin set it to Off. The report lists it as a to-do.
A colleague cannot open your run	Runs are private to the person who started them. Share the report with Copy report or Export, or point them at the Agent Ledger.
You cannot archive a run	Stop it first.
An email approval link does not work	It was used already, the run moved past that question, or it is more than 7 days old. Answer in the app.

FAQ for approvers and administrators

The questions a risk or security committee asks, answered.

Memory, permissions and standing agents

Preferences, per-change policies and agents that run on their own.

Agent Ledger

Read, decide on and export every agent action.

​The layers at a glance

​Permissions: Coverbase AI acts as you

​What Coverbase AI changes without asking

​Checkpoints

​What you can do at a checkpoint

​Questions, batches and the inherent risk review

​Answering from outside the app

​What always asks

​Don’t stop to ask

​Organization policies for each change

​Changes Coverbase AI never makes

​Stopping and steering a run

​Undoing a change

​When a run is interrupted

​The Agent Ledger

​Runs, history and exports

​Background runs and notifications

​Standing agents

​Data handling

​Troubleshooting

​Related

FAQ for approvers and administrators

Memory, permissions and standing agents

Agent Ledger

The layers at a glance

Permissions: Coverbase AI acts as you

What Coverbase AI changes without asking

Checkpoints

What you can do at a checkpoint

Questions, batches and the inherent risk review

Answering from outside the app

What always asks

Don’t stop to ask

Organization policies for each change

Changes Coverbase AI never makes

Stopping and steering a run

Undoing a change

When a run is interrupted

The Agent Ledger

Runs, history and exports

Background runs and notifications

Standing agents

Data handling

Troubleshooting

Related