HOL Guard: Open-source antivirus for AI agents
HOL Guard is an open-source local guardrail that pauses AI coding agents before risky actions like secret access and prompt injection.
HOL Guard sits between AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI and others) and the host machine, intercepting risky commands before execution with checks taking under 50 milliseconds and running fully offline. It offers four sensitivity modes — Gentle, Balanced (default), Strict, and Paranoid — and parses command structure, environment, sensitive-path access and network destinations to decide when to interrupt. The core runtime is free and open source on GitHub, with 552,000 downloads reported; the vendor says it has no telemetry on adoption because collection is off by default.
- Blocks secret exfiltration, destructive execution, prompt injection, and persistence
- Local-only design uploads no files and works offline
- Four modes with Balanced as default
- 552,000 downloads reported; free on GitHub
From the original article
3 min read at helpnetsecurity.com
HOL Guard is a tool that sits between an AI assistant and the computer it runs on. Its core local runtime is free and open source. When the assistant tries something risky, the tool pauses it and asks you first.
By @helpnetsecurity · helpnetsecurity.com
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