Comparison · Checked November 6, 2026
Start governing your AI agents today, free. Sentience is one product that grows with you: governance you can run today, then enforcement and isolated execution, configured for your workflows, when you need them. Cisco AI Defense inspects AI traffic at the network level and starts with a demo.
The differences that matter
Sentience
Cisco says
Enforced at the network level, “without the need for agents or libraries,” as part of Cisco’s security portfolio.
Sentience
Cisco says
Sentience
Yes, and the correction is yours. Runtime Enforcement follows your policy book, configured for each workflow: redirect an email to a draft, hand a payment to a person for approval, steer the agent back to its declared task.
Cisco’s pages
Blocking and filtering are described. Correcting or steering the agent is not described on the pages we checked.
Sentience
A local record of what was checked and what happened, stored as files you own. Each record names the governance profile that governed the run, by its content hash. No telemetry on the default path; governance works with the network off. Every layer includes Governor.
Cisco’s pages
An audit trail or where records are kept is not described on the pages we checked.
Sentience
A custom service. Your policy book can be mapped to ISO/IEC 42001 and EU AI Act requirements for your workflows. Because the map starts from your policy book, it reflects your own controls, not a generic checklist.
Mapping supports your assessment. It is not a certification.
Cisco says
Sentience
Governor installs beside the coding agents and frameworks you already run. Nothing to migrate.
Records stream to standard output, files or a local endpoint, so you can forward them to the guardrails, evaluation and observability tools you already use.
Enforcement runs where your agents already run, on AWS, Azure, GCP or a private environment, alongside your models and LLM gateways.
Cisco says
AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure; chatbots, RAG apps and AI agents; proprietary, commercial and open-source AI applications.
Sentience
Nothing to start.
Governor is free and Apache-2.0. Enforcement is configured for your workflows and priced per governed workflow; the per-workflow price drops as you scale. Secure Runtime is custom-built for your environment, starting with a proof of concept.
pipx install sentience-governorCisco’s pages
No price on the pages we checked. Runtime protection starts with a demo request. Cisco also offers AI Defense: Explorer Edition, for red teaming AI applications.
Cisco AI Defense entries are the vendor’s own claims, from its website as of November 6, 2026. They have not been independently tested. This page makes no claim about whether Sentience and Cisco can be used together.
Same call, two approaches
The agent is declared to resolve support tickets, with refunds up to $100. Midway through a ticket, it calls the refund tool for $450.
Captured before dispatch, flagged as outside the declared scope, recorded locally.
Your policy book caps the refund at $100 and routes the rest to a person.
The ticket is resolved. The customer is told a manager will review the rest.
Ask in the demo: Show this on our agent. Which of its tool calls does network inspection see, and what happens to the run after a block?
Before you decide
Each one turns an advertised claim into something you can see working on your own agents.
Each layer does one job
Hold any vendor, including Cisco, to the same clarity.
Governor does not stop or alter an action. It records and flags.
Runtime Enforcement redirects, pauses or stops it.
Governor flags actions outside the declared scope. It cannot judge an in-scope action against an objective nobody approved.
Your policy book, enforced at runtime.
A record supports investigation. It does not prevent incidents.
Enforcement and Secure Runtime act before the action takes effect.
Governor says nothing about runs it did not observe.
Secure Runtime runs the workflow’s actions inside its isolated, governed environment, built for production from day one.
Keep comparing
Questions
Sentience governs what agents do, action by action: Sentience Governor is open source and runs locally beside your agents, and Runtime Enforcement and Secure Runtime are configured for your workflows when you need to correct or stop actions. Cisco AI Defense describes network-level protection for AI applications, blocking malicious payloads and unwanted responses, and starts with a demo request. For teams evaluating alternatives to Cisco AI Defense, Sentience can be tried today, free.
It depends on the action. Stopping is right for an attack. For most policy violations, such as a refund over a limit, the better outcome is a corrected action and a finished task. Runtime Enforcement follows your policy book and can correct, escalate or stop, configured per workflow. Sentience Governor keeps a local record of what happened.
Yes. Sentience Governor is open source under Apache-2.0 and runs locally beside your agent, with no account. It records and flags; it does not block.
Yes, with Runtime Enforcement, configured for your workflows: it redirects, pauses or stops actions at control points integrated with your environment, following your custom policy book. Sentience Governor, the free layer, is observe-only and fail-open; it records and flags.
As a custom service, your policy book can be mapped to ISO/IEC 42001 and EU AI Act requirements. Mapping supports your own assessment; it is not a certification.
Sentience Governor works with Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents, Pydantic AI, MCP clients, LangChain and LangGraph. Runtime Enforcement runs where your agents already run, on AWS, Azure, GCP or a private environment, alongside your models and LLM gateways. Records can be forwarded to the guardrails, evaluation and observability tools you already use.
Next step
Need to stop actions, not just see them? How the layers work together