AI Traffic Control
AKA Security — We secure agent harnesses at the source.
AI Traffic Control (ai-tc) is an open-source control plane for coding agents. It watches an agent session's traffic (prompts, tool calls, responses, file reads), scans each event against your rule packs, and decides what happens next: monitor, warn, redact, block, or a manual exception. Secrets and regulated data like PCI, PHI, and PII are caught locally: live detection and enforcement never send them to a model or a third party. The one exception is the opt-in /aka:setup calibration, which does send what its history scan finds to the model API to be rated.1
How it works
Every event in a session runs through one control point before it takes effect:
prompt · tool call · response · file read → ai-tc policy engine → monitor · warn · redact · block · exception
Prompts and tool inputs are checked before they reach the model; tool outputs and file reads are checked after it responds. Each event is scanned against your installed rule packs, every match becomes a finding (rule id, category, severity, matched span), and policy decides the outcome. Everything is logged.
Detection is mostly regex, patterns shaped like an AWS access key, an email address, or a bank routing number, which covers most secrets and PII since they have a predictable shape. A smaller set of rules match on keyword, and some regex matches run through a validator, such as a Luhn checksum for card numbers or a Shannon-entropy check for high-entropy secrets, to cut false positives.
Policy outcomes
A finding resolves to one of five outcomes:
| Outcome | What happens |
|---|
| Monitor | Logged only. Every rule ships active here, so nothing is enforced until you promote it. |
| Warn | Surfaces a warning in the session; the content still goes through unchanged. |
| Redact | The matched value is replaced in place before it reaches the model. Tool inputs and outputs only, not prompt text. |
| Block | The prompt or tool call is stopped, with a message explaining what fired. |
| Exception | A manually granted, exact-value override that lets one specific match through despite its rule's policy. |
Promote any detection from monitor to warn, redact, or block from the dashboard, per rule or per category.
Key concepts
| Term | What it is |
|---|
| Event | A prompt, response, tool call, or file read captured from an agent session. |
| Finding | A rule match produced by the detection engine against an event. |
| Rule | A JSON file describing what to detect: a keyword list, a regex pattern, or a validator. |
| Rule pack | A directory of rules and their fixtures with a manifest.json. |
| Policy | The decision about what to do when a rule or category fires. |
| Plugin | The harness extension that intercepts sessions. One package, used by Claude Code and Claude Desktop. |
Where your data lives
ai-tc keeps what it records in a local SQLite store at ~/.aka/data/aka.db, with your settings beside it under ~/.aka/settings. There is no database server to run and no schema to manage — the CLI, the plugin, and the dashboard all read and write that one file.
That store is a running log of your agent sessions: prompts, responses, tool calls. Only the spans a rule flags are masked; the rest is kept verbatim and unencrypted, so aka.db builds up a full local record of what your agent saw. On macOS and Linux the store directories are created owner-only (0700) and the files are written 0600. Those permissions are the only at-rest control there is, and they do nothing on Windows.
SECURITY.md has the full picture — every file the store spans, what to do on Windows, and how to report a vulnerability.
Install
ai-tc installs as a plugin through the AKA marketplace.
Claude Code
In Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add akasecurity/marketplace
/plugin install ai-tc@akasecurity
Claude Desktop
Claude Desktop is supported too; the installation guide covers both. ai-tc runs locally alongside your agent. There's no backend to stand up, and no scanning happens off your machine.1
Docs
Full documentation, architecture, and the built-in detection catalog live at akasecurity.github.io/ai-tc-docs.
