TITLE: The New Tool That Watches Your AI Agents in Real Time DATE: 2026-07-25 COMPANY: Alterion TOPIC: AI Security SUMMARY: Alterion launched Draco on July 16, a runtime control plane that monitors every prompt, action, and payload your AI agents send, without requiring any code changes. It maps agent behaviour to SOC 2, ISO 42001, and the EU AI Act in real time, and can block high-risk actions before they complete. The launch signals a new product category: agent governance infrastructure distinct from both traditional security tools and the AI platforms themselves. WHAT CHANGED: Alterion launched Draco on July 16, 2026, describing it as the first runtime control plane built specifically for enterprise AI agents. The product addresses a gap that has opened as organisations have moved AI agents into production: most governance tools were designed for design-time policy setting, not real-time agent behaviour. Draco intercepts and analyses agent traffic as it happens. The platform is structured around three functions. Explore discovers every agent operating across the enterprise, including shadow agents and SaaS-embedded automation that IT teams may not know exist, and builds baseline behavioural profiles automatically. Protect applies context-aware threat detection, covering the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications and routing alerts to existing SIEM and SOAR infrastructure. Comply maps agent activity to regulatory frameworks and generates audit-ready evidence on demand. Co-founder Alharith Hussin described the core problem Draco solves: "Most governance tools work at design time. They set rules when agents are built, then hope those rules hold when agents are running. Draco sits in the runtime, sees every action in context, and enforces policy at the moment it matters." Co-founder Asim Hussin added: "Every enterprise we talk to has the same situation: agents in production, and no real visibility into what those agents are actually doing." The no-code-change deployment model is significant. Previous approaches to agent governance required teams to instrument their agents directly, adding logging, audit hooks, and policy enforcement into the agent code. Draco operates at the network and infrastructure layer instead, observing agent traffic without touching the agents themselves. This brings deployment time down to days rather than the months previously required for comparable coverage. --- WHY IT MATTERS: Agent deployments have outpaced governance infrastructure. The enterprise AI market moved fast in 2025 and 2026, with major platforms pushing agents into production workflows. Security and compliance tooling has not kept pace. Draco is the first product explicitly designed to close that gap at runtime rather than at design time. Regulated industries face a specific compliance crunch. The EU AI Act's high-risk system requirements, SOC 2 audit expectations for automated systems, and NIST AI RMF guidance all require documented evidence of agent behaviour. Without runtime monitoring, producing that evidence is a manual and incomplete process. Draco's on-demand evidence packages directly address this. Shadow agents are a real and growing problem. SaaS platforms, productivity tools, and cloud services are embedding AI agents by default. Most enterprise IT teams do not have a complete inventory of the agents operating on their infrastructure. Draco's Explore function is the first enterprise-grade tool for mapping this. The founders bring credibility the category has lacked. Enterprise security buyers are cautious. A founding team combining McKinsey strategy and Google engineering backgrounds, targeting Fortune 500 and regulated industry buyers, signals that Alterion is building for procurement cycles and compliance conversations, not the developer community first. Runtime control changes the risk calculus for agent deployment. Without real-time governance, organisations face a binary choice: deploy agents with accepted blind spots, or restrict deployment until governance is in place. Draco offers a third path: deploy agents now and add governance at runtime, without rebuilding anything. --- DAVID & GOLIATH ANALYSIS: The most important question for any operator running AI agents right now is not "what model are we using" but "what are our agents actually doing." Model quality is publicly benchmarked and relatively transparent. Agent behaviour in production is not. An agent connected to your CRM, your email, and your internal documents is making decisions at a speed and volume that no human reviewer can match, and most enterprises have no systematic way to see what those decisions are. Draco is the first product we have seen that takes this problem seriously at the infrastructure level. The no-code-change deployment model is the key detail: it means governance does not depend on developer buy-in or agent rebuild cycles. A security or compliance team can deploy Draco independently of the teams building and running agents. That separation of concerns is exactly what regulated industries need. The timing matters too. EU AI Act obligations are becoming real, SOC 2 auditors are asking about automated systems, and enterprise buyers are starting to demand governance evidence before signing agent contracts. Operators who have governance infrastructure in place when these conversations happen will move faster than those who are still building it. That is the David and Goliath opportunity here: small and mid-size companies that build governance infrastructure now will close enterprise deals that larger competitors, still running agents without visibility, will lose. --- RELEVANT SYSTEMS: Secure AI Brain, AI Growth Engine SOURCE URL: https://davidandgoliath.ai/daily-ai-briefing/alterion-draco-enterprise-ai-agent-runtime-governance FEED URL: https://davidandgoliath.ai/daily-ai-briefing/feed --- Published by David & Goliath | https://davidandgoliath.ai Daily AI Briefing: one AI development per day, decoded for business operators. This is a structured companion file optimised for LLM retrieval and citation.