proactive-gate for Python

proactive-gate is a library that decides whether an AI agent may message a user right now (quiet hours, daily limit, consent, snooze) and records the reason when it may not. It has ordered checks (consent, mode, snooze, mute, intensity, quiet hours, trust ramp, dismissal cooldown, budgets), JSON policies, platform and regulatory presets, and a trace that says which check stopped the message and why.

This is the Python sibling of the TypeScript package. Both implement the same behaviour contract in spec/ and run the same fixtures, so a policy written for one behaves the same in the other.

pip install proactive-gate

Python 3.11 or newer, no runtime dependencies. Add [redis] (pip install "proactive-gate[redis]") for the Redis store, or [aiosqlite] for the async SQLite store.

To run an unreleased state, install from the repository instead: pip install "proactive-gate @ git+https://github.com/Bubblegunn/proactive-gate#subdirectory=python".

The package is published from the release workflow through PyPI trusted publishing, so each file carries a publish attestation naming the repository and the workflow that built it. Releases before 0.2.2 were uploaded from a local build with a token and carry none.

Use

from datetime import datetime, timezone
from proactive_gate import Candidate, EvaluateInput, Gate, UserState, default_checks

gate = Gate(default_checks(daily_limit=3))
user = UserState.from_dict({
    "id": "u1", "consent": True, "timezone": "Europe/Istanbul",
    "quietHours": {"start": "22:00", "end": "08:00"}, "createdAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
})
candidate = Candidate(id="c1", type="reminder", priority="normal", surfaces=("push", "feed"))
inp = EvaluateInput(user, candidate, datetime.now(timezone.utc))

decision = gate.evaluate(inp)
if decision.allowed and gate.commit(decision, inp):
    send(candidate, decision.surfaces)
else:
    print(decision.rejected_by, decision.reason)

evaluate reads; commit is the atomic increment right before you send, and it is idempotent on decision.id. Every decision carries trace, one entry per check that ran.

explain(decision) renders a decision as sentences a non-engineer follows, a pure function of the trace with the same wording as the TypeScript catalog: explain(decision).summary for the decision as one sentence, .checks for one per check that ran. language defaults to "en"; another language is a mapping over the same keys in catalogs, merged over English so a partial translation still renders.

A policy is data

import json
from proactive_gate import Gate

gate = Gate.from_policy(json.load(open("policy.json")))

policy.json is the same document the TypeScript package and the CLI read ({"specVersion": "1.0.0", "checks": [{"id": "consent"}, {"preset": "usTcpa"}, ...]}). Unknown check ids and presets raise ValueError naming the known ones; shadow: true keeps a check observing without letting it decide.

Async

from proactive_gate import AsyncGate, RedisStore
import redis.asyncio as redis

gate = AsyncGate.from_policy(policy, RedisStore(redis.from_url("redis://localhost")))
decision = await gate.evaluate(inp)

Gate and AsyncGate share one decision loop (Evaluation): a check names the store keys it needs and decides purely from their values, so the two gates cannot drift. decide() runs that loop with values you supply, for tests with no store at all.

Stores

MemoryStore (in-process), SqliteStore (standard library, one file per host), AsyncMemoryStore, AsyncSqliteStore over aiosqlite (contributed by @LouisDeconinck in #32; the same file and expiry rules as SqliteStore, without blocking the loop), and RedisStore over redis.asyncio (INCR, and EXPIRE on the first increment, run as one Lua script through the client's eval, so a failure between the two cannot leave a counter with no TTL). Any object with get, set, incr and delete works. SqliteStore removes an expired row when a read touches it and clears every already-expired row on each set or incr, so a key nobody reads again still disappears.

Presets

proactive_gate.presets holds the same seventeen presets as the TypeScript package, each with its source URLs and a note on what it leaves out: LINE, WeChat, WeCom, Kakao, Korea's Network Act, Japan's anti-spam law, China's minor mode, India's TCCCPR, Brazil's LGPD, US TCPA, EU ePrivacy, Telegram, Slack and WhatsApp Business. They are reviewable defaults, not legal advice.

Conformance

pytest

runs every fixture under ../spec/fixtures through both gates. A fixture the Python package cannot yet satisfy is listed in spec/skip/python.txt with a reason; the list is empty.

License

MIT.