Three integrated components — a controlled developer environment, a local enforcement agent, and a centralized admin console — form a complete AI governance layer for your engineering org.
Each component is designed to operate independently and fail safely. Together they provide end-to-end visibility and control over every AI interaction.
A hardened, policy-governed IDE built on a stable open-source foundation. Developers get the full coding experience they expect — syntax highlighting, AI completions, terminal, debugging — within a controlled surface area that your security team manages.
Extension and integration access is defined by policy. Unapproved tools simply aren't available. There's no configuration drift, no shadow plugins, and no user-installed workarounds.
A lightweight background service installed on each developer machine. It operates system-wide — not as an IDE plugin — which means it intercepts AI traffic from any application on the machine, not only the controlled IDE.
Enforcement runs in two layers. Rules handle the deterministic floor — credential patterns, blocked destinations, watermarked exports. An on-device judge then classifies the intent of what's left: testing vs. shipping, brainstorming vs. exfil, public reference vs. trade secret. Your policy maps each intent class to one of six response modes. When the local judge isn't confident, the case escalates to a cloud judge for a second opinion. When no policy can be retrieved, the agent fails closed.
A web-based management interface for your security and IT teams. Create and manage tenants (teams, business units, or customer organizations), author and publish policy, and review the complete audit trail across your fleet.
Policy is organized into functional groups — AI egress, clipboard and data transfer, terminal and extension access, session management, and more — giving you granular control without requiring you to understand implementation internals.
All Tether components — agent, browser extension, IDE plugin, and policy bundles — ship as signed, versioned artifacts. Update cadence is per-channel and configurable per tenant. Air-gap deployments serve the same artifacts from an internal mirror.
Cryptographically signed installer packages for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Distributed via your existing MDM (Jamf, Intune, etc.) or pulled directly from a per-tenant artifact channel.
Auto-update mode is configurable: immediate (track latest stable), staged (canary fleet then broad rollout), manual (pinned version, ops-controlled), or off (air-gap, internal mirror only). The on-device judge model ships bundled with the agent — new model versions are signed and verified before activation.
Distributed via Chrome Enterprise / Edge for Business managed policies — installed silently and unremovably on all enrolled developer endpoints. Updates flow through the standard managed-extension channel.
For air-gap and SCIF deployments, the extension is served as a signed CRX/XPI from your internal extension mirror, with auto-update disabled and version-pinning enforced by the agent.
Distributed via the native marketplaces for VSCode, Cursor, and JetBrains IDEs. Enterprise customers can pin a specific build or mirror the marketplace through their own registry.
The plugin handles the in-IDE coaching UI, the controlled extension allowlist, and the integration with the agent's policy engine. Out-of-date plugin versions degrade gracefully — AI features are blocked until the plugin is in range.
Policy is distributed independently of binary releases. Each bundle is a versioned, cryptographically signed manifest of rules. The agent verifies the signature against your tenant's pinned public key on every fetch — and re-verifies on every request before applying.
Typical deployments pull policy on a 60-second heartbeat. Air-gap deployments load policy bundles via approved one-way media into the internal admin console, which then re-signs and distributes within the tenant.
Every policy axis — AI egress, clipboard, terminal access, external links, and more — can be configured independently to one of six enforcement modes.
Policy applies across seven functional groups. Each group is independently configurable and can be set to different modes per tenant.
Intercept, evaluate, and enforce policy on all outbound requests to AI APIs — completions, chat, embeddings, and custom endpoints.
Control clipboard operations — copy, cut, paste — and apply content detection rules to prevent sensitive data from being copied out of controlled contexts.
Define command blocklists and allowlists for the integrated terminal. Prevent data exfiltration via curl, wget, and other transfer utilities.
Define which IDE extensions are permitted. Unapproved extensions are unavailable — preventing shadow AI tools from being installed by individual developers.
Configure idle timeout, session lock, and reauthentication requirements. Ensure unattended machines don't remain accessible.
Gate external link opening, developer tools access, print and screen capture operations to prevent data from leaving via OS-level paths.
Control drag-and-drop operations between the IDE and other applications. Prevent file and content exfiltration via UI drag operations.
Configure per-tenant branding and UI customization for enterprise deployments. Present the controlled environment under your organization's identity.
Purpose-built for developer AI egress control — a gap that CASB platforms, endpoint DLP, and code scanners don't close on their own.
| Capability | Tether Connect | CASB / Cloud Proxy | Endpoint DLP | Code Scanners |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| System-wide AI egress interception | ✓ All tools, all traffic | ~ Routed traffic only | ~ Partial | ✗ |
| On-device AI payload analysis | ✓ Local judging | ✗ Cloud-routed | ✗ | ✗ |
| Air-gap / offline capable | ✓ By design | ✗ | ~ Partial | ~ Partial |
| Tamper-evident policy distribution | ✓ Cryptographically verified | ~ Config-based | ~ Varies | ✗ |
| Flat-rate, no per-seat cost | ✓ Self-hosted | ✗ | ✗ | ~ Some |
| Controlled developer IDE | ✓ Included | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Plugins only |
| Multi-tenant policy management | ✓ Admin console | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Immutable audit trail | ✓ Every decision | ✓ | ✓ | ~ Scan results only |
We'll walk through your specific threat model, deployment requirements, and integration questions.