What is Argus?
Argus is a free, open-source security operations platform you host yourself. It maps your cloud, identity, code, device, network and Kubernetes assets into one evidence graph, detects attacks including fast, AI-driven ones, uses AI agents to triage and investigate, and fixes problems through an action broker with approvals, dry runs, automatic rollback and a kill switch. It also governs your own company's AI use with an AI gateway and shadow-AI discovery.
Can Argus act on its own? Is that safe?
Only if you turn it on. Autonomous response and autonomous pentesting are off by default and need both a deployment setting and a per-tenant opt-in. Playbooks start in shadow mode, run only reversible actions, are capped per hour, and roll back automatically unless someone keeps the change. The AI agents themselves never execute anything: they investigate with read-only access and can only propose actions. Every change goes through the same broker, and the kill switch stops everything instantly.
Can an attacker trick the AI?
Argus is designed on the assumption that someone will try. Everything an agent reads is wrapped and labelled as untrusted data, and the agent is told that instructions found inside evidence are a sign of an attack. The agents are tested against prompt-injection evaluation suites, and because they cannot execute anything themselves, a tricked agent can at most file a request that still has to pass policy and approval.
What does the attack simulator do to my systems?
Nothing. It replays synthetic attack data in a hidden, isolated sandbox that copies your detection settings. It sends no traffic, runs no tools and touches no real system. Simulated detections can't trigger autonomous response, alerts or findings. You get a coverage report showing which attacks your rules would catch and which would get through.
What is shadow AI, and how does Argus help?
Shadow AI is staff using AI tools the business hasn't approved, often by pasting in customer or company data. Argus finds AI services in your network, cloud and SSO data and keeps an inventory you review. Its AI gateway gives your team approved access to OpenAI and Anthropic models with company-held keys, data-loss rules, budgets, prompt-injection flags and a usage log.
Does it replace my SIEM or EDR?
It works with them. Argus takes events in from thirteen sources, including CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, GuardDuty, Wazuh and CloudTrail, can contain devices through CrowdStrike and SentinelOne, and sends alerts to Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, email and webhooks. Many teams run it alongside existing tools as the layer that connects the evidence, investigates it and governs the response.
Which AI models does it work with?
Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, local models through Ollama, or none at all. With no model configured, the specialists fall back to deterministic logic, so detection and triage still work. Budgets cap every agent run by steps, tokens, time and cost.
Does my data leave my network?
Argus is self-hosted, so the platform and its data stay in your infrastructure. The only outside calls are the ones you set up: the cloud and identity APIs it collects from, the channels you send alerts to, the public threat-intel feeds, and a model provider if you choose a hosted one. With a local model and offline threat-intel files, no AI or intel traffic leaves your network at all.
Is it ready for production?
The platform core (tenancy, sign-in, roles, the audit trail, the job queue, policy and approvals) is tested end to end on SQLite and PostgreSQL in CI. Like any security platform, it should be tuned to your environment: connect the collectors you use, tune the detection rules, and run in monitoring-only mode before enabling any action. That tuning is exactly what the install service covers. Argus is not a certified product.
Does Argus make us SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliant?
No software does that alone. Argus ships a control mapping for SOC 2, NIST 800-171 and ISO 27001 that shows which controls it can provide evidence for, such as the signed audit trail, role-based access and approval records. That makes the audit faster, but your auditor still assesses your program as a whole.
What does it cost?
The software is free under the MIT license. You pay only for the infrastructure you run it on and any AI model you choose. If you want it installed for you, the install is scoped and priced after a short call about your environment, and you keep everything: the code, the configuration and the credentials.
I'm a business owner, not a security engineer. Is this for me?
If you have cloud accounts, staff logins, customer data or code worth protecting, the protection is for you. You don't need to run it yourself. Book a call, tell me what you use, and I'll tell you plainly whether Argus is the right fit or whether something simpler would serve you better.