Runlayer wraps OpenClaw agents with an enterprise control plane

As employees install autonomous assistants on work devices to speed routine tasks, a wave of unmanaged OpenClaw instances has emerged. Runlayer’s product treats those instances as governable infrastructure rather than unruly endpoints, packaging discovery with active enforcement so security teams can fold agents into normal operations and compliance workflows.

OpenClaw Watch scans for unapproved agent servers across devices and network boundaries, using MDM hooks and network signals where available. Deployment options include cloud, private VPC, and on-premises installs so security teams can log and forward events into SIEMs such as Datadog and Splunk. The goal is to make agent interactions auditable, routable and visible to SOC workflows rather than hidden on developer machines.

The historical context makes that visibility urgent: independent researchers and routine scans of OpenClaw deployments have surfaced reachable admin interfaces and misconfigured gateways that exposed bot tokens, API keys, OAuth secrets and chat transcripts. Those exposures, plus prompt-injection and social‑engineering proof‑of‑concepts that can coax agents into revealing private keys or acting as a compromised user, have made agent discovery and runtime controls a practical priority for security teams.

At the enforcement layer, ToolGuard intercepts tool calls and inspects execution outputs in real time, flagging patterns that resemble remote code execution or credential leaks before an agent completes a dangerous action. Runlayer targets aggressive latency (sub-100 milliseconds) so policies can block harmful flows without materially disrupting legitimate automations.

Runlayer positions the control plane as security tooling rather than an LLM inference service, citing SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance to reassure regulated buyers. The vendor emphasizes identity-aware policy enforcement by integrating with providers such as Okta and Entra, enabling rules that map actions to users and services rather than treating agents as anonymous processes.

The company reports meaningful improvements in controlled tests — for example, a jump in prompt‑injection resistance and high detection rates for credential‑exfiltration patterns — and says several customers in payroll, retail and hiring tech are piloting the stack instead of banning agents outright. Pricing is structured around a platform fee to encourage broad internal rollout rather than per-seat billing.

Runlayer’s approach complements other mitigation patterns emerging in the ecosystem, such as container‑first runtimes that isolate each agent’s memory and filesystem and aim for least‑privilege execution. While isolation and hardened runtimes (sandboxing, strict defaults and credential rotation) remain important, Runlayer argues that discovery plus identity‑aware, low‑latency enforcement fills a gap for enterprises where many agent instances are already running uncontrolled.

Operationally, the vendor recommends combining runtime hardening with the control plane: use least‑privilege hosts, rotate exposed keys, limit network exposure and feed telemetry into incident response. Runlayer also highlights the need for continuous tuning and independent validation: real-world efficacy will depend on correct deployment, rule maintenance and integration with existing security processes.

If the product delivers as claimed, it could shift enterprise posture from outright prohibition of agent tooling to governed adoption — enabling productivity gains while reducing the most acute attack chains. That shift would also create a new procurement bar: buyers will demand SLAs, attestations and proof of third‑party testing to accept agent governance stacks into regulated environments.