Governance means you can show what the system did, why, and with what data. AWS CloudTrail records API calls (who invoked which model, who changed a guardrail or a prompt version). Bedrock model invocation logging records the prompts and responses themselves to S3 or CloudWatch Logs. Together they answer audit questions: who asked what, which model and prompt version answered, and what it said.
Track where data comes from. The AWS Glue Data Catalog registers data sources and their schemas, and Glue can track lineage as data moves through jobs. Tag documents with their source, owner and date, carry those tags through retrieval, and show them as citations, so any answer can be traced back to a document.
Document models. SageMaker AI model cards record a model's intended use, limits, training data, evaluation results and risk rating in a standard form, which reviewers and regulators can read. Write down a foundation model's known limits the same way, and the guardrails you apply.
Check for bias. Amazon SageMaker Clarify measures bias in data and model predictions. For generative output, compare answers across groups: run the same prompt with only a name, gender or region changed and score the results (an LLM-as-a-judge evaluation can do the scoring), and A/B test prompt variants with Prompt Management. Track the scores over time in CloudWatch; bias can drift as data and prompts change.
Be transparent with users. Show sources for RAG answers, say when they're talking to an AI, show confidence when it's low, and for agents, keep the reasoning trace (Bedrock Agents traces, AgentCore Observability) so a reviewer can see why it acted. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and CloudWatch alarms watch for drift and policy violations and can start a remediation workflow automatically.
Put it together as policy: approved models, required guardrails, logging on, data retention set, human review for high-risk actions, and regular evaluation. The AWS Well-Architected Tool's Generative AI Lens is a checklist for reviewing a workload against good practice, and AWS Service Catalog can offer pre-approved, compliant building blocks to teams.