Existing security tools cannot protect autonomous agents.
API gateways don't understand agent context. Semantic firewalls are probabilistic and easily bypassed. DIY implementations lack verifiable cryptographic audit trails.
Architectural comparison
| Capability | Actsurance Shield | API Gateways (Kong/Apigee) | Semantic Firewalls |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enforcement Location | Action layer (between agent and systems) | Network edge (between client and server) | Prompt layer (between user and agent) |
| Decision Logic | Strict deterministic rules | Static IP/rate limits, no context | Probabilistic AI guessing |
| Secret Handling | Zero-trust automated injection | Pass-through (agent must hold the keys) | Pass-through (agent must hold the keys) |
| Audit Trail | Cryptographically verified, tamper-proof receipts | Standard HTTP access logs | Unsigned text logs |
| Protection Against | Tool abuse, exfiltration, confused deputy | DDoS, rate abuse, unauthenticated access | Toxicity, basic jailbreaks, PII in prompts |
Why not an API Gateway?
API gateways are designed to secure your servers from external clients. They do not understand the internal state, intent, or context of an AI agent. If an attacker compromises an agent's context, the API gateway will see a valid, authenticated request coming from the agent and allow the exfiltration. Actsurance evaluates the intent of the action against the agent's constrained policy before the request ever reaches the external API.
Why not a Semantic Firewall?
Semantic firewalls use an LLM to evaluate another LLM's output. This is fundamentally flawed for security enforcement because LLMs are non-deterministic. They can be bypassed by novel prompt injection techniques. Actsurance enforces security using deterministic code (Go and Python) and YAML policies. We use AI for risk scoring, but never for the final ALLOW/DENY decision.
Why not build it in-house?
You can write a basic tool-call interceptor in a weekend. Building a highly available enforcement tier designed for low-latency enforcement with a cryptographically verifiable audit trail takes months of distributed systems engineering. When you sell to the enterprise, a self-attested log table in Postgres isn't enough. You need the third-party cryptographic receipts that Actsurance provides to prove to an auditor that a record wasn't tampered with post-incident.
Why Actsurance Questions
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Contact SalesWhy is Actsurance Shield different from prompt-layer controls?
Actsurance Shield sits at the execution layer, not the prompt layer.
Why does deterministic enforcement matter for AI agents?
YAMLbased, defaultdeny engine. No AI in the enforcement path.
Why does Actsurance Shield keep credentials away from agents?
Agent never sees raw credentials. Secrets are injected at execution time inside a restricted broker.
Why does Actsurance Shield produce cryptographic receipts?
Ed25519signed, SHA256 hashchained receipt for every decision.
Why does Actsurance Shield matter for compliance?
Realtime mapping to 11 frameworks. OSCAL export available.
Does Actsurance Shield use AI to make enforcement decisions?
No. The Hybrid AI Risk Engine uses a 3-tier fallback (regex, Ollama Llama 3.1, NVIDIA NIM Nemotron-120B). AI informs risk scoring but never decides enforcement. The policy engine is fully deterministic.