MoorAI secures the developer's on-device use of AI agents. It reviews prompts and MCP tool-calls locally, on the machine, before anything reaches an API — content-free by construction, so prompt and payload content never leaves the endpoint. It wraps the AI coding agents your developers already run: Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot CLI. Security teams see only redacted, content-free signals — a category, a risk level, a one-way hash. Open source (AGPL-3.0).
Salt Security is an API-security vendor extending to agentic AI through its Agentic Security Graph, delivering four pillars: Agentic Discovery & Observability (a central record of APIs, MCP servers, and agent interactions), Posture Governance (access controls and configuration aligned to AI-management-system risk objectives), Data Traceability (observability into data flowing to and from models), and Behavioral Threat Protection (blocking model theft, data poisoning, and logic abuse at the API layer). Salt positions ISO 42001 as implicitly requiring API security, citing Clause 5.4, Clause 8, and Annex A.2.5.
These two operate at different layers. Salt secures the API and network layer — inline, org-wide, seeing API traffic to and from models. MoorAI secures the developer's on-device use of AI agents — content-free, on the machine, before anything reaches an API. They are largely complementary: Salt at the gateway, MoorAI at the endpoint. The comparison below is architecture-level, not a feature scorecard.
The wedge is the layer, not the feature list. Salt Security's Agentic Security Graph is a mature, API-centric platform. MoorAI is not trying to be a smaller version of it — it sits one layer earlier, on the endpoint, and answers a different question: before a prompt or an MCP tool-call ever becomes API traffic, was it allowed to leave this machine at all?
Salt Security and MoorAI operate at different scopes and different layers. Salt's Agentic Security Graph is an API-centric platform — discovery and observability of APIs, MCP servers, and agent interactions; posture governance; data traceability; and behavioral threat protection — enforced inline, org-wide, at the API layer. MoorAI does one thing: it reviews the prompts and MCP tool-calls a developer sends to a coding agent, locally on that developer's machine, before anything reaches an API — so content is never inspected off the device.
Where MoorAI is different. The on-device, content-free properties an inline API-layer platform can't match — Salt's genuine strengths are in the honest take below.
| MoorAI | Salt Security | |
|---|---|---|
| Content never leaves the machine | ✓content-free by construction | ✗inspects & classifies content |
| Only category / risk / one-way hash leave the device | ✓redacted signals only | ✗content-based observability |
| No tokenize-and-forward of content | ✓no proxy, no forwarding | ✗API traffic through the gateway |
| Reviews prompts before they reach any model / API | ✓on the device, pre-send | ✗at the API layer, after send |
| Reviews AI output, not just prompts | ✓reviews prompts + responses | ✓data traceability — model I/O |
| On-device MCP tool-call gateway — blocks before the call runs | ✓pre-execution, on-device | ✗observes at the API layer |
| MCP server allow-list at call time | ✓Agency Enforcement allow-list | —posture governance; call-time unconfirmed |
| Per-tool MCP argument rules | ✓per-tool arg inspection | —payload inspection; per-tool unconfirmed |
| Model-endpoint allow-list | ✓approved-endpoint allow-list | —access controls; endpoint allow-list unconfirmed |
| Shadow-AI agent discovery | ✓on-device discovery | ✓agentic discovery |
| Browser + desktop AI-app discovery | ✓browser + desktop apps | —API-observed, not endpoint apps |
| AIBOM — live agent / model / MCP inventory | ✓live, content-free inventory | ✓central API / MCP / agent record |
| Content-free data lineage / Event Flow | ✓source → actor → destination | ✗content-based data traceability |
| Cryptographically signed, tamper-evident decisions | ✓per agency decision | —unconfirmed |
| JIT elevation + entitlement envelope | ✓JIT elevation + envelope | —unconfirmed |
| Per-agent assurance score | ✓per-agent, content-free | —unconfirmed |
| Rules-file poisoning detection | ✓fingerprint only, content-free | —unconfirmed |
| Lethal-trifecta / cross-server toxic-flow detection | ✓named content-free detector | —cross-flow graph; trifecta framing unconfirmed |
| Break-glass / offline fail-closed | ✓offline fail-closed | ✗cloud-inline, no offline mode |
| Natural-language policy authoring | ✓plain-language rules | —unconfirmed |
| Compliance packs (OWASP LLM Top 10 / NIST / ISO 27001·42001 / EU AI Act) | ✓full crosswalk | —ISO 42001 positioning; full pack unconfirmed |
| Open source (AGPL-3.0) | ✓AGPL-3.0 | ✗proprietary |
| No account / no platform to stand up | ✓open agent, no account | ✗enterprise platform |
| Free to start | ✓community agent, free | ✗commercial platform |
The honest take. Salt Security is genuinely strong on its home ground — a mature API-security platform now extended to agentic AI, giving you inline, org-wide observability into API traffic, MCP servers, and agent interactions, with behavioral threat protection at the API layer and posture governance mapped to AI-management-system risk objectives. If your requirement is a single inline platform inspecting all agent and API traffic across the whole organization, that is exactly what it is built for. MoorAI is deliberately different: it sits one layer earlier, on the developer's machine, and is content-free by construction — so prompt and payload content never passes through a vendor at all, and it is open source. The two are largely complementary: Salt at the gateway, MoorAI at the endpoint below it. And we are precise about MoorAI's narrowness — its on-device MCP gateway governs Claude Code today via PreToolUse hooks, while Codex and Copilot CLI are detection-only, because those CLIs expose no equivalent enforcement hook yet.
Salt Security capabilities described here are drawn from Salt Security's own published material, including its ISO 42001 one-pager describing the Agentic Security Graph and its four pillars, and reflect its stated architecture. Salt Security and Agentic Security Graph are trademarks of Salt Security, Inc.; this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by Salt Security. Comparison is architecture-level — verify current specifics against each vendor's docs. A “—” cell means we could not confirm the capability either way from published material; it is not a claim that the capability is absent.
Recently shipped in MoorAI — all on-device and content-free: a lethal-trifecta detector, rules-file poisoning detection (CLAUDE.md / .cursorrules), a capture-tier toggle (content-free by default), per-tool MCP argument rules, a per-agent assurance score, a data-lineage / Event Flow view, on-device model escalation, just-in-time elevation, and cryptographically signed agency decisions — mapped across OWASP LLM Top 10, NIST CSF, NIST AI RMF, SOC 2, ISO 27001/42001, and the EU AI Act.