Harness AI December 2025 Updates: Ship Faster Without Sacrificing Control | Harness Blog

Our December Harness AI updates focus specifically on enhancements to Harness AI governance. You can review our Harness AI November updates here.

The Governance Paradox

Every platform engineering team faces the same tension: developers want to move fast, while security and compliance teams need guardrails. Too much friction slows delivery. Too little creates risk.

What if AI could help you have both?

With Harness AI, you can accelerate pipeline creation while automatically enforcing your organization's policies. Every AI-generated resource is traceable, auditable, and compliant—by design.

AI-Powered Policy Generation

Open Policy Agent (OPA) policies are the backbone of governance in Harness. They enforce rules across:

• Pipeline governance: Who can deploy what, where, and when
• Entity governance: Standards for services, environments, and connectors
• Cost governance: Spend limits and resource constraints
• Security scan governance: Required scans before promotion

The challenge? Writing Rego policies requires specialized knowledge. Most teams have a handful of people who understand OPA, and they're constantly backlogged.

Harness AI changes this.

Now, anyone can describe a policy in plain English and let AI generate the Rego code:

"Create a policy that requires approval from the security team for any deployment to production that hasn't passed a SAST scan."

Harness AI generates the policy. Your experts review and approve. Governance scales without bottlenecks.

Build Compliant Pipelines from the Start

Here's where governance and productivity intersect.

Your organization has invested in "golden" pipeline templates - battle-tested, approved configurations that encode your best practices. The problem: developers don't always know they exist, or they take shortcuts to avoid the complexity.

With Harness AI, developers simply ask:

"Build me a deployment pipeline that references our golden Java microservices template."

Harness AI:

1. Searches your template library to find the right template
2. Constructs a pipeline that properly references it
3. Inherits all the governance baked into that template

The result? Developers get pipelines in seconds. Platform teams get compliance by default. Learn more about referencing templates here.

What Can Harness AI Generate?

Any AI-generated resource can be saved as a template for others to reuse, thereby compounding your investment in standards.

Built-In Guardrails: OPA Enforcement on Every Action

What happens when AI generates something that doesn't meet your policies?

It gets caught immediately.

When a user saves or runs an AI-generated pipeline, Harness evaluates it against your OPA policies in real-time. If there's a violation:

1. The action is blocked (save or run fails)
2. Clear feedback is provided explaining why
3. The user can fix it in the AI chat by describing the needed changes

For example:

Policy Violation: "Production deployments require a manual approval stage. Your pipeline is missing this step."

User prompt: "Add a manual approval stage before the production deployment."

Harness AI: Updates the pipeline to comply.

This feedback loop turns policy violations into learning moments, without leaving the AI experience. Learn more about Harness AI and OPA policies here.

Full Auditability: Every AI Action is Traced

In regulated industries, "an AI built it" isn't an acceptable audit response. You need traceability.

Harness AI provides it:

AI-Generated Label

Every resource created by Harness AI is automatically labeled:

ai_generated: true

‍This label persists through the resource lifecycle. You always know what was created by humans versus AI-assisted.

Audit Trail Integration

All AI-generated entities appear in the Harness Audit Trail with:

• Who prompted the creation (the user)
• What was created
• When it was created
• How it was created (AI-assisted)

Execution Evidence

For AI-generated pipelines, you can:

• View execution history to see how the pipeline performed
• Download execution logs for compliance documentation
• Validate outputs to confirm the pipeline meets requirements

This gives auditors and compliance teams the evidence they need—without manual documentation overhead.

Security by Design: AI Operates Within User RBAC

A common concern with AI assistants: "What if it does something the user shouldn't be able to do?"

Harness AI eliminates this risk with a fundamental design principle:

Harness AI can only do what the user can do.

The AI operates on behalf of the authenticated user, inheriting their exact Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) permissions:

There's no privilege escalation. No backdoors. No "AI admin" account. The AI is an extension of the user—bound by the same rules.

The Governance + AI Workflow

Here's how it all comes together:

‍

Why This Matters

For Platform Engineering Teams

• Scale governance without becoming a bottleneck
• Ensure template adoption by making it the easy path
• Reduce policy violations with real-time feedback
• Maintain audit trails automatically

For Developers

• Build pipelines faster with natural language
• Stay compliant without memorizing policies
• Learn from violations instead of getting blocked
• Use templates without hunting for documentation

For Security & Compliance Teams

• Enforce policies consistently across all pipelines
• Trace AI-generated resources with clear labels
• Audit with confidence using execution evidence
• Trust the access model with RBAC inheritance

Get Started with Harness AI + Governance

Already a Harness customer? Harness AI is available across the platform. Start by:

1. Enabling Harness AI in your account settings
2. Creating OPA policies for your key governance requirements
3. Building pipeline templates that encode your standards
4. Letting developers prompt their way to compliant pipelines

New to Harness? Request a demo to see AI-powered governance in action.

‍