---
title: "Policy-based guardrails for AI agents"
description: "Policy-based guardrails for AI agents: secure agentic workflows, RAG pipelines and MCP servers with policy-driven access control and full decision logging."
canonical: "https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/ai-security"
source: "https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/ai-security"
---

# Policy-based guardrails for AI agents

Secure agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and MCP servers with policy-driven access control and full decision logging.

*Build your AI security strategy*

## Control access for every identity, at any scale

- **Consistent access control everywhere** — Enforce fine-grained, contextual authorization across apps, APIs, services, and AI systems from a centralized control layer.
- **Powerful policy lifecycle management** — Define, test, and validate access policies before deployment. Manage through Git and CI/CD. Roll out policy updates instantly across all enforcement points.
- **Zero Trust security at runtime** — Authorize every AI and service request at runtime. Prevent over-permissioned actions with contextual, least-privilege enforcement.
- **Compliance ready visibility** — Record every allow or deny decision with full request context and policy version so authorization behavior is fully traceable across all identities.

## Launch production-ready AI systems with Cerbos

1. **Every action is checked** — When a user clicks a button, a service calls an API, or an AI agent uses a tool, the request is sent to Cerbos.
2. **The request is evaluated** — Cerbos reviews who is making the request, what they want to do, what they want to access, and the surrounding context.
3. **The decision is enforced** — Cerbos returns ALLOW or DENY. The application follows that decision before the action runs.

## Access control for AI agents and every other use case

Cerbos is an authorization management platform that scales with your business.

- [AI agent guardrails](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/agentic-authorization)
- [MCP server security](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/dynamic-authorization-for-MCP-servers)
- [RAG authorization](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/access-control-for-rag)
- [AI gateway governance](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/ai-gateway-authorization)
- [Application permissions](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/application-permissions)
- [Multi-tenant SaaS access control](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/per-tenant-custom-policies)
- [Programmatic permission management](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/dynamic-policies)
- [Legacy application authorization](https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/legacy-app-authorization)

## Weak authorization is how breaches start. AI scales the mistake.

- **Over-permissioned access** — AI agents and services can do more than they should. One mistake can expose sensitive data or trigger unauthorized actions.
- **Gaps between systems** — When access rules live in different services, decisions become inconsistent. Attackers exploit those gaps.
- **Access that never expires** — Long-lived tokens and shared credentials stay valid long after they are needed, increasing the chance of compromise.
- **No way to stop it instantly** — If an agent goes beyond its scope, access continues until someone rotates credentials or restarts systems.

## Become compliance-ready with every access decision, AI or human

- SOC 2
- SOC 3
- HIPAA
- ISO 27001
- GDPR
- FedRAMP
- PCI DSS
- NIS2
- DORA

*Plug into your existing stack*

## Go live with authorization in one sprint

- **Capture every decision for all identities** — Log requests, actions, resources, access outcomes, and service-to-service authorization calls for both humans and machines.
- **Trace policy lineage** — See the exact policy, version, and release behind each decision for complete traceability.
- **Monitor with context** — Review detailed logs, policy versions, and real-time metrics across all PDPs and environments.
- **Simplify audits and compliance** — Maintain centralized, structured logs on-premise to support audits and demonstrate readiness for FedRAMP, SOC 2&3, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR.

- **MCPs** — Integrate Cerbos authorization with Fasten MCP and Anthropic MCP to control agent workflows at the orchestration layer.
- **Vector stores** — Enforce policy-based access for embeddings and retrievals across FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, and Qdrant.
- **AI infrastructure** — Deploy Cerbos policies alongside your AI model APIs. Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, and other inference providers.
- **SDKs** — Use Cerbos SDKs for languages like JS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, and .NET to authorize requests from your application code.

## Purpose-built authorization, not a generic policy engine

| | Generic policy engines | Cerbos |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Policy language** | General-purpose policy languages designed for broader use cases. | YAML policies purpose-built for authorization, readable by security teams. |
| **Authorization model** | Authorization patterns must be assembled from generic primitives. | First-class RBAC, ABAC, and PBAC with principal/resource/action semantics. |
| **Evaluation latency** | Varies by policy complexity and engine architecture. | Sub-millisecond, optimized for per-request evaluation at machine speed. |
| **Policy lifecycle** | Custom sync, manual distribution, separate CI/CD tooling. | Cerbos Hub: managed policy lifecycle with CI/CD, testing, and real-time distribution. |
| **Audit and compliance** | Decision logs require additional infrastructure to capture and correlate. | Structured decision logs with policy version lineage, built in. |

*Implementing Zero Trust with Cerbos*

## Why engineering teams love Cerbos

> When I did an audit, I found that the cost of managing authorization and authentication in-house over the entire lifespan of the company was in the 7 figures. Cerbos saved that. Deploying Cerbos has allowed our engineers to spend their time on what really matters for our success.
>
> — Chuck Hardy, Head of Engineering @Salesroom

> Having to modify authorization is a five-minute job now. Having to troubleshoot authorization is a five-minute job. So that has actually allowed the team to spend more time where it really matters on the platform.
>
> — Karen Kim, CEO @Human Managed

> We rely on Cerbos to make authorization decisions across the whole mesh - millions of times a day. And it’s fast. We don’t even think about it anymore. It just works.
>
> — Rob Crowe, Principal Engineer @Utility Warehouse

> We went from one user - every role, to a world where there are many users - many roles. And the product, it relies on Cerbos to actually bring the value that we want to bring to customers. All of our customers are relying on Cerbos, by relying on the product, which is of course relying on Cerbos.
>
> — Joe Lines, CEO & Co-Founder @Nook

> One of our big considerations was speed. We have strict latency tolerances. When it comes to Cerbos - you can call it a hundred times during a request and it doesn't matter. It's incredibly fast.
>
> — Steve High, Staff Engineer @Complex

> The main reason we switched to Cerbos was to have a sophisticated authorization software to help organize and handle our authorization. We wanted to focus on domain related features and spend less time backtracking and fixing issues with our authorization.
>
> — Lead Software Developer at @BarrierSystems

> Cerbos enables us to go to market very quickly, compared to an in-house solution. It allows us to offer new products faster, because creating or editing policies is so easy.
>
> — Engin Attar, Head of Product and Growth, Co-Founder @Debite

> We got the foundation set. Now we can scale and include more complex policies. And we can grow in the right direction and with the right security thanks to Cerbos authorization management.
>
> — Edgar Rivera, CTO @4gcapital

> Having the separation of the permissions from the code base just makes the code base more elegant. It makes the permissioning more elegant. It means they're centralized, so they're not tied to specific endpoints. And ultimately it means that different business owners have the ability to actually make updates.
>
> — Henry Arnold, CTO & Co-Founder @Nook

> We're not worried about scaling because we can easily increase our load on Cerbos. It will also be easy for us to change how we're distributing policies as we reach different points of scale.
>
> — David Workman, Senior Software Engineer @ Salesroom

> Offering dynamic roles and permissions makes us more competitive in the market. We’re providing companies with a software that can be adapted to their workflows.
>
> — Ibrahim Bou Ncoula, CTO @Supy

> We can create unlimited conditions, attributes, and parameters at any level of granularity without writing any code. It allows us to deliver truly personalized services quickly, securely, and at scale.
>
> — Karen Kim, CEO @Human Managed

## Learn more about AI security

- [Governing AI coding agents with Cerbos Synapse](https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/governing-ai-coding-agents-with-cerbos-synapse) — Article
- [Securing AI agents and non-human identities in enterprises](https://solutions.cerbos.dev/securing-ai-agents-non-human-identities-in-enterprises) — Ebook
- [A CISO’s benchmark for authorization maturity](https://solutions.cerbos.dev/authorization-maturity-model-a-cisos-benchmark) — Ebook
- [Dimmer switch: AI agent governance](https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/dimmer-switch-not-a-kill-switch-rethinking-ai-agent-governance) — Article
- [Zero Trust for AI: Securing MCP Servers](https://solutions.cerbos.dev/zero-trust-for-ai-securing-mcp-servers) — Ebook
- [Implementing authorization in RAG-based AI systems with Cerbos](https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/access-control-for-rag-llms) — Article
- [Multi-hop delegation for AI agents, explained](https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/multi-hop-delegation-ai-agents) — Article
- [Best AI agent security and governance tools](https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/best-ai-agent-security-and-governance-tools) — Guide