Making those decisions takes three things: control, so every action, human or agent, stays governed; context, so agents understand the business and stop hallucinating; and choice, so you're never locked into a single cloud, model, or format. Together, these are what governance has to mean in the agentic era.

Five years ago, Databricks pioneered data and AI governance by releasing Unity Catalog, the industry's only unified governance solution for data and AI across clouds, data formats, and data platforms. More than 14,000 organizations now govern their data and AI on Unity Catalog.

Today, we're advancing Unity Catalog to deliver on all three: control, context, and choice. Here's what's new.

For years, governing an asset meant governing access: who can query this table, who can call this model. But agents don't just access assets; they act through them, calling models, invoking tools, and connecting to MCP servers. To meet this shift, we are introducing a suite of capabilities built to govern the entire lifecycle of an agent's behavior.