ServiceNow Forms AI Governance Alliance With 11 Firms

ServiceNow has launched a Control Tower Alliance, a partner programme with 11 founding members including OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services and NVIDIA, to build and certify AI tools that plug into its governance software. The company says customers will get a curated set of products that have passed its testing before they are listed.

The announcement, repeated on X, comes as large software vendors compete to become the place where companies track and control their AI agents. It follows ServiceNow’s move to plug its workflows into Google’s Gemini Enterprise.

Eleven founding members

The members are Anthropic, AWS, Cisco, HiddenLayer, Kong, NVIDIA, Okta, OpenAI, Stripe, WitnessAI and Zenity. ServiceNow describes them as companies in AI, cloud infrastructure, security, governance, value measurement and token metering. Their products will connect to the ServiceNow Super Intelligence Control Tower, which the company sells as a single place to discover, secure, govern, observe and measure the AI a business uses.

“AI governance requires an ecosystem of partners willing to innovate together on an open platform to protect every vulnerable point in an enterprise,” said Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president, chief product officer and chief operating officer.

Three ways partners work with ServiceNow

ServiceNow sets out three tracks. Under “build together”, partners create products that run on Control Tower rather than as standalone tools. Under “deliver with governance”, their products must pass ServiceNow qualification and certification, with shared standards for agent identity and safety guardrails. Under “sell and lead together”, selected partners build joint offerings that ServiceNow sells and supports worldwide.

The alliance sits alongside ServiceNow’s existing Store and Workflow Data Network Partner Passport programmes. The release does not mention fees or revenue sharing.

Kill switches, runtime limits and metering

The member quotes show what the integrations are meant to do. Okta’s chief product officer, Ely Kahn, said the work combines ServiceNow’s “containment decision layer with Okta’s kill switch capability to block new token requests from agents acting beyond their intended scope”. He said the two companies want open standards that would make “a cross-platform kill switch possible”.

NVIDIA’s Pat Lee said ServiceNow supplies the workflows and business context, while “NVIDIA OpenShell enforces the boundaries at runtime”. Cisco said its AI Defense product will feed AI asset visibility and security findings into ServiceNow. Scott Woody, chief executive of Metronome, a Stripe product, said it will help companies with usage-based billing and spending controls.

Security specialists make up a large part of the list. HiddenLayer’s chief executive, Christopher Sestito, said his company brings “purpose-built, complete AI security” while ServiceNow supplies the platform and workflow orchestration. WitnessAI said its models, designed to read the intent behind prompts, add policy control, usage analytics and cost controls. Kong’s chief executive, Augusto Marietti, said it will extend governance “into real-time enforcement across the APIs, models, and tools that AI agents depend on”.

OpenAI and Anthropic are listed as founding members, but neither is quoted in the release.

A gatekeeper bid for agent governance

The alliance is a bid to make ServiceNow the checkpoint that AI tools pass through before they reach a large company. Certification is the lever: if buyers come to expect a ServiceNow listing, security and model vendors have a reason to integrate on its terms. Its rivals are pursuing the same idea, with IBM putting agent identity and a kill switch into its own stack and Salesforce adding evaluation and spending caps to Agent Fabric.

The Okta comment shows the limit of any one vendor’s control. A kill switch that only works inside one platform does little if an agent also holds credentials elsewhere, which is why Okta talks about open standards rather than a ServiceNow-only feature. Shared formats, such as the agent skills specification Anthropic gave to AAIF, may matter as much as any certification badge.

Having OpenAI and Anthropic on the list is useful for ServiceNow, but the release gives no detail on what either model maker will build. For now this is a partner framework and a list of names. The first certified products, and whether customers pay for them, will show how much it changes.