Data Access Control for AI Agents
Your AI agents are accessing data they shouldn't right now.
Every agent you deploy retrieves data from the same pool: documents, tools, databases. Without knowing what each user is allowed to see. Protecto sits between your agents and your data, enforcing access rules based on the user, role, and task before anything is revealed.
- SOC 2 Certified
- GDPR & HIPAA Ready
- Live in <15 minutes
- Trusted by Engineering Teams Building AI at Scale
The Problem
Your AI agents return whatever they find. They don't know what each user can see.
Most teams control data access at the application layer. Agents retrieve first and filter later, or not at all.
Your agents retrieve sensitive data that most users shouldn't see. You have no way to stop them without breaking the workflow
Agents have broad retrieval access because they need to answer a wide range of questions. That same access means every agent run is a potential exposure event for data users were never supposed to see, with no record of what was shared.
You'd have to rewrite every agent to add access rules, and it still breaks when policies change
Hardcoding role checks into each agent takes weeks and creates brittle logic. Every policy change means touching every agent. There's no central place to set access rules once and apply them everywhere automatically.
Your platform runs agents for dozens of roles. The same agent sees all data regardless of who triggered it
Multi-tenant platforms and role-based products need different data visibility per user. Agents don't carry that context by default. You need something that injects it without changing how each agent is built.
How it works
Add one line of code. Protecto handles the rest.
Protecto sits between your AI and your data. Nothing changes in how you built your app.
Detect
When an agent retrieves data from a tool, document, or database, Protecto inspects what came back. It identifies every sensitive entity in the payload: names, IDs, financial fields, health records, before the agent processes a single character.
Transform
Protecto checks the current user's role, the active task, and your access policy. Data the user is permitted to see passes through. Data they're not permitted to see gets masked with a safe token before the agent reads it. The agent still gets a complete, usable response.
Govern
Every retrieval, masking decision, and data reveal is logged with the user identity, entity type, and timestamp. Your compliance team gets a complete record of what each agent accessed on behalf of each user. No extra instrumentation needed.
See how to reduce unauthorized sensitive data exposure across agent workflows.
Capabilities
Three ways Protecto controls agent data access.
Protecto intercepts data at retrieval, enforces access rules before agents process it, and logs every decision for audit.
Limit what each agent retrieves based on who's asking
AI agents pull data to answer questions. But the data they pull from doesn't know who triggered the agent or what that user is allowed to see. Protecto intercepts the retrieval payload and filters it against the user's role and your access policy before the agent reads a single character.
- Checks user identity and role against your access policy on every agent call, before the agent sees the data
- Filters or masks data the current user is not permitted to see: tool outputs, database responses, and retrieved documents
- Policy is set once and applied across every agent automatically, with no per-agent code changes required
Show safe data by default. Reveal sensitive fields only when the user is authorized.
Not every user who triggers an agent needs every field in the response. Protecto replaces sensitive data with safe tokens by default. When a user is authorized to see the real value, Protecto reveals it on request. Everyone else sees the masked token and nothing changes for them.
- Lock-by-default: all sensitive fields are masked until an authorized reveal is explicitly requested by a permitted user
- Reveals original values only for users, roles, and tasks that your policy explicitly permits
- Less than 1% impact on AI answer quality. Context stays intact even when fields are masked
Track what sensitive data was retrieved, masked, or revealed across every agent run
Your agents make hundreds of retrieval and reveal decisions per day. Protecto logs every one: what data was retrieved, what was masked, what was revealed, and which user triggered it. Compliance teams get an exportable record with no extra instrumentation.
- Logs every retrieval, masking event, and authorized reveal with user identity, entity type, and timestamp
- Exportable audit trail matches what GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 auditors need. No reformatting required
- Zero extra code. Logs are generated automatically by Protecto for every single call
Customer story
How a Fortune 100 tech company enforced AD access policies across a multi-agent AI stack — without rewriting a single agent
Challenge: A Fortune 100 technology company built multi-agent AI across product engineering, customer support, analytics, and IT operations. Sensitive data flowed through agent chains — documents, logs, emails, tickets — and different teams needed different access levels. Existing Active Directory roles had no way to enforce access at the agent layer.
Zero Trust at inference time — no rewiring of existing infrastructure
“We had agents pulling from the same data pools, but different teams had completely different permission levels. The agents didn’t know any of that. We needed something that could sit between the retrieval step and the LLM and enforce our AD roles in real time, without us rewriting every agent.”
— Head of AI Infrastructure, Fortune 100 Technology Company
Days
Time to full deployment
Real-time
AD-enforced role control at inference
100%
Data access logged for compliance reporting
Integrations
Works where your data lives
One line of code. Drop it into what you already built. Nothing else changes.
Common Questions
Questions from AI and platform teams
Where in an agent workflow can unauthorized data access occur?
Data access issues happen at multiple points: when an agent retrieves documents or database rows, when tool outputs return more fields than a user needs, when agents store data in memory across turns, and when the final response includes data the triggering user was never supposed to see. Protecto enforces access rules at each step.
Does filtering data by role break the AI agent's answers?
No. Protecto uses context-preserving masking, so the agent still gets a complete response. Sensitive fields are replaced with readable tokens, not deleted. Tests show less than 1% change in answer quality across standard QA tasks on GPT-4 and Claude 3.
How long does it take to get started?
Most teams are up and running in under 15 minutes. You add one function call to your agent pipeline. Nothing else changes about how the agent works, what tools it calls, or how it retrieves data.
Which privacy laws does Protecto help with?
Protecto maps to GDPR Article 25, HIPAA §164.312, CCPA §1798, and SOC 2 CC6. Every access decision and masking event is logged with a timestamp, user identity, and entity type. Ready to export for an audit with no extra processing.
Does Protecto work with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and OpenAI?
Yes. Protecto integrates with all major agent frameworks via a single API call or SDK wrapper. No changes to your agent architecture, tool definitions, or retrieval setup required.
Can authorized users or systems still access the original sensitive data?
Yes. Protecto’s de-tokenization API returns the original value to any user or system your policy explicitly permits. Everyone else gets the masked token. The agent itself never receives the real value unless the triggering user has permission to see it.
Data Access Control for AI Agents
Deploy agents that respect data access rules. Every user sees what they're allowed to see.
30 minutes. We'll show you exactly which data your agents are exposing today, and how to enforce access rules without rewriting them.
- SOC2 Certified
- HIPAA Compliant
- GDPR Ready
- ISO 27001