HOL Guard

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

HOL Guard (hashgraph-online/hol-guard) is an Apache-2.0 local-first runtime security gate from the HOL (Hashgraph Online) consortium that evaluates a coding agent’s shell commands, file reads, MCP tool calls, prompts, and package or skill installs before they run, returning allow, observe, ask, or block, and records a local trail of security receipts.

Its design point is a published coverage contract: instead of advertising blanket protection, it asserts per-harness which event surfaces it can see, whether approvals are native or fall back to a browser, and whether failure blocks or fails open, with each assertion dated, commit-linked, and given an expiry.

What it is
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A local runtime installed per harness with one script (curl -fsSL https://hol.org/guard/install.sh | bash -s -- --harness <name> --mode install --verify) or from PyPI, with no account required for local use. The stable coverage contract asserts fifteen harnesses (Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot CLI, Cursor, Cline, Antigravity CLI, Hermes, OpenClaw, Antigravity, Kimi Code, Grok Build, Pi, Oh My Pi, and ZCode), each with its event surfaces, approval path, fail behavior, and named limitations. Beyond command and secret guarding it inspects the supply chain around the agent: bundled skills, plugins, hooks, agent settings, and MCP server configuration, with a separate plugin-scanner CI action for publishers. Guard Cloud is the commercial layer on top: synced and searchable module settings, org-wide policy that local devices cannot weaken, team dashboards, and receipt sync across machines, while enforcement stays local and works offline. The vendor is HOL, a consortium (its site lists 34 ecosystem partners and 65 public repositories) that positions the guard as part of an agentic-AI standards effort rather than a single-company product.

Status
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Active and shipping fast: 828 stars, 147 forks, and 120 open issues as of 2026-10-09, created 2026-03-28, pushed 2026-10-09, with v3.36.1 published 2026-10-09 and 226 PyPI releases total.

PyPI downloads are 76,527 over the last month as of 2026-10-09 (pypistats), and the product page claims 771,000+ all-time Guard downloads plus “5.4K+ HOL GitHub stars”, an org-wide figure across all 65 HOL repositories rather than the Guard repo’s own count. The coverage assertions on the site were verified 2026-09-09 and carry an expiry of 2026-10-09, the day of this check, so the published contract is due its own re-review. A Hacker News search returns no threads about Guard (the single loose query match is an unrelated project), so the adoption evidence is the download count, the release cadence, and Product Hunt testimonials rather than independent technical discussion.

Strengths
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The coverage contract is the most candid enforcement documentation in this category: every harness row names what Guard cannot see (inline model edits without tool calls, background sessions without a terminal, prompt events on several harnesses) instead of implying complete coverage.
Breadth beyond the command surface: package, skill, plugin, hook, and MCP-configuration inspection covers the supply-chain paths most command guards ignore entirely.
The maintainer-side plugin-scanner action turns the same checks into a CI gate for plugin publishers, which is a different distribution surface than any other guard here.
Local-first with an org overlay: Guard Cloud policy that local devices cannot weaken is the feature a team actually needs, and the FAQ states enforcement never depends on cloud connectivity.

Cautions
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Depth varies by harness and the gaps are the story: Kimi Code, Grok Build, and ZCode fail open, Cursor terminal commands outside agent sessions bypass it, and Claude Code background sessions surface no hook events at all.
The published assertions expired the day of this check, so treat any specific coverage cell as needing re-verification rather than a standing guarantee.
No independent audit or adversarial review exists; a Hacker News footprint of zero six months in means the security claims rest on the project’s own evidence links.
The freemium ladder (Solo $4.99, Pro $15, Team $30 per month) puts receipt sync and org policy behind payment, and one release page carries an unresolved “attribution for this release is being verified” notice, a small but odd provenance wrinkle for a security product.

Pricing
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Guard Local is free and open source under Apache-2.0, no account required. Paid tiers, published as structured data on the product page: Solo $4.99 per month, Pro $15 per month, Team $30 per month, and Enterprise by contact, adding receipt sync, org policy, dashboards, and alerts.

Price history
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Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-10-09	Free	Recorded at $0, Guard Local, Apache-2.0, no account	https://hol.org/guard
2026-10-09	Solo	Recorded at $4.99/month	https://hol.org/guard
2026-10-09	Pro	Recorded at $15/month	https://hol.org/guard
2026-10-09	Team	Recorded at $30/month	https://hol.org/guard

Compared to
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CC Safety Net: the closest neighbor, also a per-CLI hook guard, MIT and entirely free, with parse-then-decide command blocking across sixteen CLIs; choose CC Safety Net for the simplest free command-and-secrets guard, HOL Guard when you also want approvals, receipts, package and skill scanning, or org policy.
Veto: an authorization kernel you wrap tools with in code, with approval routing and offline-verifiable receipts; choose Veto for in-process gates on money-and-data actions, HOL Guard for hook-based coverage of desktop coding agents.
Microsoft Agent Governance Toolkit: the programmatic multi-language governance program; choose it when governance must live in your application code rather than in the agent’s hook surface.

Bottom line
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Recommended for developers who want one guard across many coding-agent CLIs that covers commands, secrets, packages, skills, and MCP configuration, with approvals and local receipts and a paid path to team policy. Not for org-scale governance (that is a control plane, not a workstation guard), and not where a fail-open harness surface is an unacceptable risk, since three asserted harnesses say so in the project’s own contract.

Changes
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2026-10-09 - Created from the awesome-ai-governance entrant scan, profiling the consortium-backed coverage-contract guard with its freemium cloud.

References
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https://hol.org/guard - product page: coverage claims, pricing tiers as structured data, scale figures, Guard Cloud scope
https://hol.org/guard/security/coverage - the per-harness coverage contract: event surfaces, approval paths, fail behavior, limitations, verified and expiry dates
https://github.com/hashgraph-online/hol-guard - repository: README, install paths, plugin-scanner, license
https://api.github.com/repos/hashgraph-online/hol-guard - stars, forks, issues, creation and push dates as of 2026-10-09
https://api.github.com/repos/hashgraph-online/hol-guard/releases - v3.36.1 published 2026-10-09 and the extension-artifacts release train
https://pypi.org/pypi/hol-guard/json - version 3.36.1, 226 releases
https://pypistats.org/api/packages/hol-guard/recent - 76,527 downloads in the last month as of 2026-10-09
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=hol-guard&tags=story - the zero-thread community-footprint check as of 2026-10-09

receipts on tomrochette.com

HOL Guard

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receipts on tomrochette.com

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