How Ceros Gives Security Teams Visibility and Control in Claude Code

Security teams have spent years building identity and access controls for human users and service accounts. But a new category of actor has quietly entered most enterprise environments, and it operates entirely outside those controls.

Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, is now running across engineering organizations at scale. It reads files, executes shell commands, calls external APIs, and connects to third-party integrations called MCP servers. It does all of this autonomously, with the full permissions of the developer who launched it, on the developer's local machine, before any network-layer security tool can see it. It leaves no audit trail that the existing security infrastructure was built to capture.

This walkthrough covers Ceros, an AI Trust Layer built by Beyond Identity that sits directly on the developer's machine alongside Claude Code and provides real-time visibility, runtime policy enforcement, and a cryptographic audit trail of every action the agent takes.

The Problem: Claude Code Operates Outside Existing Security Controls

Before walking through the product, it helps to understand why existing tools cannot address this problem. Most enterprise security tooling sits at the network edge or the API gateway. These tools see traffic after it leaves the machine. By the time a SIEM ingests an event or a network monitor flags unusual traffic, Claude Code has already acted.

Claude Code's behavioral profile compounds this problem significantly. It lives off the land, using tools and permissions already on the developer's machine rather than bringing its own. The result is a gap that network-layer tools structurally cannot close: everything Claude Code does on the local machine, before any request leaves the device. That is where Ceros operates.

Getting Started: Two Commands, Thirty Seconds

Ceros is designed so that installation does not disrupt developer workflow. Setup requires two commands:

curl -fsSL https://agent.beyondidentity.com/install.sh | bash
ceros claude

The first command installs the CLI. The second launches Claude Code through Ceros. Once enrolled, before Claude Code generates a single token, Ceros captures full device context, including OS, kernel version, and disk encryption status. It ties the session to a verified human identity through Beyond Identity's platform, signed with a hardware-bound cryptographic key.

The Console: See What Claude Code Has Actually Been Doing

Navigating to the Ceros admin console reveals a complete record of what Claude Code has actually been doing across the environment. The Conversations view shows every session, including the specific tool calls (like shell commands) triggered by developer prompts. The Tools view allows security teams to see exactly what was executed, with what arguments, and what was returned.

The MCP Server view is often the most critical for security teams. MCP servers connect Claude Code to external services like databases or Slack. Ceros shows every MCP server connected across all devices, allowing teams to identify unapproved data access paths.

Policies: Enforcing Controls on Claude Code at Runtime

Ceros moves from observability to enforcement through runtime policies. Administrators can implement MCP server allowlisting, tool-level restrictions (such as blocking Bash access), and device posture requirements. These policies are evaluated at the moment of action, ensuring that security controls are active throughout the entire AI session.

The Activity Log: Audit-Ready Evidence

The Activity Log provides a comprehensive, cryptographic record of all actions, making the organization audit-ready and ensuring compliance in the age of AI agents.