Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Zenity: which layer does the audit obligation actually land in?

Zenity is the best-funded rival in agent safety. They earned it. Say you have ten thousand low-code agents in Copilot Studio. No idea who built them. Zenity will find them. It scores their posture. It flags the risky ones at runtime. Their current line: "Zenity secures long-horizon AI agents at the decision, the exact point where context and intent come together to create the highest risk." That's a sharp claim. Sharper than most in this space.

DataShield sits one layer down, in the call path. Data gets tokenized at ingest. Agents query it as tokens, over MCP. Undoing a token is a guarded, logged step. Each governed tool call gets checked against the agent's current access before it dispatches. The choice gets sealed into a hash chain. You can check it yourself, no help needed. This page is about which job your compliance duties need. Often it's both, in a set order.

Get free Demo Center access Get an instant quote

The short version

Pick DataShield when

You have to satisfy EU AI Act Article 12 and 26 or HIPAA §164.312(b). Those are logging and record-keeping duties. They land on the enforcement layer, not the dashboard above it. Our chain maps to them. Run the verifier yourself.
The agents that worry you touch PII or PHI. We classify it. We generalize quasi-identifiers. Dates to year, decade or age band. ZIPs to 3 or 4 digits. Partial phones, SSNs and emails. Each column gets a measured shrink score. Then we tokenize at ingest. Zenity has no data plane.
You need an agent's access pulled mid-job. The next tool call should fail, not trigger an alert after it ran. How Auth does it.
You want proof on your own setup, with your keys. Zenity is SaaS only. Their logs live in their tenancy.

Pick Zenity when

Your estate is Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio, or Salesforce Agentforce. That's their home turf. It includes GA inline prevention for Copilot Studio. We have nothing there.
You don't know what agents you have. Discovery and shadow-AI inventory across SaaS, homegrown, and device agents is a real product. We don't build one.
You want runtime anomaly detection with response playbooks. Their AIDR does intent-based detection. We do governance and proof, not detection.
You're buying on maturity signals: Fortune 500 customers, $55M+ raised, a 2025 Gartner Cool Vendor listing, and a 2026 "Company to Beat" mention. We're a small team. Our fleet products are young.

Bottom line: Zenity tells you which agents are risky. We prove each governed call was allowed, on data pseudonymized before the model saw it. Plenty of regulated buyers need both. If you're sequencing, start with the layer the regulation names.

Feature by feature

Vendor cells describe what Zenity's public site and docs say, as of the date above. If we got it wrong, email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it, and credit you.

What matters	DataShield	Zenity	Edge
Audit evidence	SHA-256 hash chain. Ed25519-signed checkpoints, chained too. The check names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Built to map to EU AI Act Art. 12/26 and HIPAA §164.312(b). Try the verifier.	Logs sit inside their SaaS setup. We found no public cryptographic tamper evidence.	◆
Agent authorization	In the dispatch path: scope ceiling, declared access tier, mid-job pull-back check, metering. Then sealed audit.	Posture scoring, plus detection and response. Third-party analyses note they don't secure MCP tool execution itself.	◆
Agent discovery	None cross-platform. We have an MCP services registry for our own plane and that's it.	Auto-find, shadow-AI inventory, ownership catalog across the estate. Truly strong.	◇
Runtime detection	Not our product. We decide and record; we don't score intent.	AIDR does intent-based anomaly detection with response playbooks.	◇
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed urgent access for agents that auto-revokes and can't quietly vanish from the log.	Not in their public docs.	◆
Tokenization and data handling	Data gets tokenized at ingest. Agents query it as tokens, over MCP. Undoing a token is a guarded, logged operation. Tokens are deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible. Plus PII and PHI classification across 129 field classes. Plus quasi-identifier generalization. Dates to year, decade or age band. ZIPs to 3 or 4 digits. Partial phones, SSNs and emails. Each column gets a measured shrink score.	No tokenization vault and no data-plane protection that we could find.	◆
GDPR erasure	Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities are HMAC-committed. The chain still verifies after the subject is gone.	Governance rules. Erasure of data an agent already handled isn't addressed in public docs.	◆
Platform coverage	MCP-native. Any MCP client or server tokenized by Auth. No Copilot, no low-code.	M365 Copilot, Copilot Studio with inline prevention GA, Agentforce, ChatGPT Enterprise, Bedrock, Vertex, Azure AI Foundry. Plus light coverage of Cursor and Claude Desktop.	◇
MCP and agents	Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology, and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, per-call metering attributed to the agent.	Agent-plane sight, not tool-level control. Posture flags the risk. It doesn't block the call.	◆
Deployment	Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center. Or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys.	SaaS only as of the date checked. Worth asking whether that's changed.	◆
Maturity signals	Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live and running (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). SOC 2 is planned, not attested, and we say so.	Founded 2021. $55M+ raised, including Microsoft's M12. Fortune 500 customers. Gartner Cool Vendor 2025, "Company to Beat" 2026, Black Hat research through Zenity Labs.	◇
Pricing	Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	No public price. Sales-led. No figures on their site.	◆

◆ DataShield leads◇ Zenity leads◈ comparable

Zenity claims come from zenity.io and our battlecard research, last checked 13 September 2026. Where we couldn't find it in their public docs, we say so. We don't assume it doesn't exist.

Three things you get here that you won't get from a posture platform

Evidence, not a dashboard

A reviewer asks for the March logs. A risk score isn't an answer to that question. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The checker names the failure, not just reports one. That's what EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers want. Try the verifier, no account.

A decision in the call path

Posture tells you an agent has too much access. It doesn't stop the call. Every governed tool call passes three checks first. A scope ceiling. An access tier. A pull-back check. An analyst gets offboarded mid-job. The next call fails closed. How Auth does it.

Protection on the data itself

Zenity secures the agent plane. Nobody in that layer tokenizes the PHI in the payload. We classify it. We generalize quasi-identifiers. Then we tokenize at ingest. Undoing a token stays a guarded, logged step. The architecture.

Where Zenity is genuinely stronger

Almost everything about sight lines. You can't govern what you can't see. Cross-platform agent discovery is a hard product, and we haven't built one. Say your Copilot Studio estate has grown to thousands of low-code agents. No owner list. Zenity solves a problem we can't even describe for you. Their runtime detection is real. Copilot integration reaches GA inline prevention too. Their research arm publishes work that lands at Black Hat. The Gartner recognition is earned, not bought attention.

And here's my objection. Their own analyst narrative cites a report. "Emerging Tech: The Future of AI Security is in Securing Agent Actions, Not Prompts." That's the right instinct. But it points straight at a layer they don't occupy. Securing an action means standing in the path when it happens. It means proving, after, what you decided. Gartner also expects most such incidents through 2028 to be internal policy violations, not attacks. A policy violation by a well-behaved agent looks normal to an anomaly detector. So ask Zenity to block one MCP tool call, in-band. Ask them to reverse a pseudonym under policy. Ask them to prove a log entry didn't vanish. If the answers are no, that isn't a flaw in their product. It's the edge of their layer. And that's where your Article 12 duty lands.

Questions worth asking both of us

Put these to each vendor in this space, us included.

Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?

DataShield: yes. Each entry commits to the one before it. Ed25519 checkpoints chain over the top. The checker tells a removed row apart from a truncated tail. And from an edited field. Go break the sample chain at /verify. Zenity: their logging lives in their SaaS. We found no public tamper-evidence proof. Ask them to show one. Ask who at their end can edit a record.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

Access gets checked at dispatch, on each governed call. A pull-back stops the next one, and the context drops with it. Zenity can detect and respond to odd behaviour. But we found no description of in-path access tiers, or mid-job pull-back. Ask this. If I pull an entitlement while a 40-minute job runs, does the next tool call still execute?

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

Crypto-shred destroys the per-subject key material. It makes an ISO 27560 receipt. The chain itself stays untouched and still verifies. Because the actors in it are HMAC commitments. Zenity documents governance rules. The handling of data an agent processed isn't covered in their public docs. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks anything downstream.

Should we run both?

Often, yes. We'll say so on a call. A regulated firm may run a large Copilot estate, plus MCP-native agents on PHI. It needs discovery and posture from one vendor. It needs enforcement plus proof from another. Our view on sequencing: the regulation names logging and record-keeping. Fund the layer that makes the record first. Sight is the upgrade, not the floor.

Does Zenity protect the data itself?

Not as far as we can tell. There's no tokenization vault, and no data-plane protection, anywhere in their public docs. That fits where they started, in low-code app security. So the EDPB's masking argument for AI models isn't a story they can tell. Ask them how PHI in a tool-call payload gets protected before the model sees it.

Zenity has Microsoft's M12 on the cap table. Does that matter?

Maybe. Depends how you feel about the merger wave. We have no hyperscaler investor. That's a real difference, but not a reason on its own to pick us. Judge it on this. Would you mind your agent governance vendor getting bought by the platform it governs?

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

No, SOC 2 is planned, not attested. Auth is live, with a public threat model and a checker anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have been live since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow, so a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. If SOC 2 is a hard gate this quarter, say so on the first call. We'll tell you whether to wait for us. Security page.

Zenity's current hero: "Secure AI Agents Everywhere." Sub-head: "Zenity secures long-horizon AI agents at the decision, the exact point where context and intent come together to create the highest risk." - zenity.io, 13 Sep 2026
Analyst proof devices on their site: "Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance," Gartner Cool Vendor in Agentic AI TRiSM (2025), and a cited report, "Emerging Tech: The Future of AI Security is in Securing Agent Actions, Not Prompts." - zenity.io, 13 Sep 2026
No public pricing. Sales-led, SaaS-only delivery. Re-checked with no change since July 2026. - zenity.io, 13 Sep 2026
≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. - Gartner, 2026
EDPB names pseudonymization as a GDPR risk mitigation for AI models. - EDPB Opinion 28/2024
EU AI Act Article 12 requires automatic recording of events over the lifetime of a high-risk system. Article 26 puts log retention on the deployer. - EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689

Other head-to-heads

Direct

Get free Demo Center access

You've seen the proof

Ready for a number? Scope your deployment and we'll price it against your own economics.

Get your quote →