TapPass governance for DeepSeek Harness

The authority layer for agentic AI, as a DeepSeek Harness plugin.

Everything in DeepSeek Harness is a plugin. This is the one that decides what your agents are allowed to do.

Guardrails and safety classifiers ask "is this output harmful?" That is a property of the model. TapPass asks a different question: "is this agent allowed to do this, under our rules, right now?" That is a property of your business, and no model level tool can answer it, because the answer lives in your organisation, not in the weights.

This plugin intercepts every tool call at the harness's tools/pre-execute seam, sends it to the TapPass policy decision point (POST /v1/govern), and allows, denies, or escalates it for human approval.

Why it is different

• Business rules, not model safety. Write the rule once, in your language: "refunds over 500 need a human", "no customer PII leaves the EU region", "this agent may read the CRM, never write it". It is enforced on every tool call, on every harness, under every model. A prompt is a suggestion. A policy is a fact.
• Authority is earned. The plugin ships in observe mode: from the first minute it watches and records every call, and blocks nothing. You see what your agents do before you enforce a single deny. Then you turn on enforcement for what matters. Autonomy is a track record, not a checkbox.
• Harness and model agnostic. The same rules that govern an agent here govern it in Claude Code, in Codex, behind LiteLLM. The harness is interchangeable. The authority is not.
• EU hosted, EU AI Act ready.

Install

# create a profile if you do not have one, then add the plugin
dsh plugin --profile default add @tappass/dsh-governance

# point it at your TapPass workspace
export TAPPASS_API_KEY="tp_dev_..."      # a TapPass developer key

# verify the layer without booting, then run
dsh --profile default --dump-config
dsh --profile default

Get a developer key from your TapPass dashboard (Settings, Developer keys) or POST /api/agents/{agent}/developer-keys. The key is bound to one agent and one org; TapPass records the audit trail against it.

Configure

Every tool call is governed once it is installed. Configuration is optional; the defaults are safe.

Key	Default	Meaning
baseURL	https://api.tappass.ai	TapPass API base. The plugin POSTs to ${baseURL}/v1/govern.
apiKeyEnv	TAPPASS_API_KEY	Env var holding your tp_dev_ key. A reference, not the secret.
mode	observe	observe: send and record every call, block nothing. enforce: honor verdicts.
onError	deny	In enforce, when TapPass is unreachable: deny (fail closed) or allow (fail open).
timeoutMs	4000	Hard timeout per verdict call. A slow PDP never wedges the agent loop.
agentId	harness agent id	Override the agent id sent to TapPass.
orgId	from the key	Override the org id; normally stamped from the developer key.

Set them in your profile's patch, for example to enforce:

# $DSH_HOME/profiles/default/cordis.patch.yml
- tappass-governance:
    config:
      mode: enforce

How a verdict becomes a decision

TapPass outcome	dsh PreToolDecision	Effect
allow	next()	the tool runs
block	{ kind: 'deny', reason }	the model gets an error result with the reason
needs_approval	{ kind: 'ask', reason }	routed to the harness approval flow for a human

In observe mode every call returns next(), but a would-be block or approval is still recorded server side and logged locally, so you can size your policy against real traffic before enforcing.

Honest limitations

• No argument rewriting. DeepSeek Harness makes tool arguments read only at tools/pre-execute by design (they are already logged and shown to the model), so a TapPass modify verdict cannot be applied in place. This plugin fails such a call closed in enforce mode with a clear reason rather than silently running the unmodified request. Redaction obligations are surfaced, not applied.
• Approval needs an open turn. A needs_approval verdict maps to the harness ask decision, which routes to whatever approval answerer your profile mounts. With no approver configured, ask fails closed to a denial, which is the safe default.
• Developer preview. DeepSeek Harness and its plugin API are pre-release and may change. This plugin is deliberately thin: it is a bridge to /v1/govern, so if the harness API shifts the fix is a small shim, not a rewrite.

Develop

npm install --legacy-peer-deps   # dsh rc packages have skewed peer ranges
npm run build
node --test

The verdict mapping and the /v1/govern client are covered by test/plugin.test.mjs and run against a local mock server, no TapPass instance required.

Links

• TapPass: https://tappass.ai
• The authority layer for agentic AI. Authority is earned. Even by AI.

License

MIT © Cogniqor BV (TapPass)