Arcjet vs Straiker

Arcjet vs Straiker

Both products aim to stop unsafe agent behavior before it causes harm, and both cover coding agents. The main differences are where enforcement happens and who owns the rules. Straiker's guardrails are configured in the Straiker console and applied at gateways or through integrations with agent platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Copilot Studio and Salesforce Agentforce. Arcjet's policies are written in Rego or a builder, published centrally, and evaluated at the point in your code or hook where the action runs, with inputs such as tenant, plan or amount that a gateway does not see.

Arcjet publishes this comparison. Competitor details come from Straiker's public website, partner documentation and announcements, reviewed on October 15, 2026.

What is Straiker?

Straiker describes itself as "the agentic AI security company," with the headline "Agentic AI Security for Every Agent." It offers four capabilities:

• Discover AI finds agents, shows the tools and MCP servers they use, and flags misconfigurations, including MCP servers with known vulnerabilities.
• Ascend AI continuously red-teams agents across tools, MCP servers and workflows, testing for prompt injection, tool misuse, data leakage and multi-turn attacks, with results mapped to OWASP, MITRE ATLAS, NIST and the EU AI Act.
• Defend AI provides runtime guardrails that detect and block prompt injection, data leakage and tool manipulation across prompts, reasoning steps, tool calls and multimodal inputs.
• Agentic Kill Switch, launched in August 2026, contains an agent by revoking tool access, suspending sessions or taking it offline.

Straiker is delivered as SaaS. Defend AI can run in monitoring mode through API integrations with agent platforms, or as an inline gateway deployment that blocks in real time. Straiker publishes integrations with the LiteLLM proxy and Kong Gateway, where each control can block or run in detect-only mode. For coding agents, Straiker names Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Windsurf, using a thin client that runs alongside existing IDE and terminal workflows.

Straiker raised a $64 million Series A in June 2026, bringing its reported funding to $85 million. It holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications and publishes security research through STAR Labs.

What is Arcjet?

Arcjet is an AI agent runtime security platform that discovers the agents running in your organization, enforces policy across every action, prompt and tool call, and keeps the evidence to prove what happened. Arcjet enforces in the path of the action, in code or in the agent's hook, not on the network.

For agents and applications you build, the Arcjet JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and Go SDKs provide guard() for tool calls, queue workers and MCP handlers, and protect() for HTTP routes. Arcjet integrates with 15 agent frameworks, including the Claude Agent SDK, LangChain, LangGraph, Mastra, OpenAI Agents, the Vercel AI SDK, CrewAI and Google ADK. You write Guard policies in Rego or a builder, run them in dry run, and publish them from the Arcjet Console or MCP server.

For coding agents, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex and Muse Code call Arcjet from the hooks they already fire, with no SDK and no code change. One Arcjet policy applies across all five agents, installed through managed settings so developers can't remove it without admin access.

Arcjet detectors cover prompt injection, sensitive information, destination threat analysis and token budgets. The same SDK covers bots, rate limiting, Shield WAF and email validation on HTTP routes. The Arcjet Console records every decision, and on the Enterprise plan decisions export to Datadog, Splunk, SentinelOne, Panther and Amazon S3.

How do Straiker and Arcjet differ?

Where the decision is made

A gateway sees the traffic between an agent and a model or tool. That makes it a practical place to inspect prompts and responses across many applications without changing their code. It also means the decision is made with the information that passes through the gateway.

Arcjet makes the decision inside the application, at the line of code that is about to run the action. Your code can pass in what it already knows, such as which tenant the request belongs to, which plan they are on, or how much a refund is for, and the policy can use those values. This is the main reason teams pick in-path enforcement: rules like "refunds over $500 need approval for this plan" depend on context that only the application has.

Who owns the rules

Straiker's guardrails come preconfigured and are tuned in its console, which suits security teams that want detection to work without writing rules. Arcjet policies are explicit and reviewable. Security teams publish them from the Console, CLI or MCP server, engineering teams can add app-specific rules in code, and every new rule starts in dry run so you can see what it would block before it blocks anything.

Which fits: Straiker, Arcjet, or both?

When to choose Straiker

Straiker fits when any of the following apply:

• You want discovery, red teaming, runtime protection and a kill switch from one vendor.
• Your agents run on platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Copilot Studio or Salesforce Agentforce, and you want protection through those integrations.
• You already route model traffic through LiteLLM or Kong and want to enforce there.

When to choose Arcjet

Arcjet fits when any of the following apply:

• Rules need application context, such as tenant, plan, amount or recipient.
• You want explicit, reviewable policy in Rego, tested in dry run and published centrally.
• You need one policy across Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex and Muse Code as well as the agents you build.
• You want bot detection, rate limiting and WAF rules in the same SDK as your tool-call checks, with published pricing and a self-serve start.

Using both

Straiker and Arcjet can work in layers. Straiker's red teaming can find the weaknesses in an agent, and those findings can become explicit Arcjet policies on the actions involved. A gateway can screen traffic across many applications, while Arcjet enforces the rules that depend on what a specific application knows.

What are the alternatives to Straiker?

• Pillar Security covers discovery, red teaming and runtime guardrails across the agent lifecycle.
• Noma Security covers agent discovery, access control, red teaming and detection and response.
• Zenity secures agents on SaaS and low-code platforms such as Copilot Studio.
• AI agent security platforms compares the category by where each product enforces.