Argus – a free, open-source agentic security operations platform – MIT

Argus is a free, open-source security operations platform that watches your cloud, logins, code and devices around the clock, catches machine-speed attacks the moment they start, and shuts them down in seconds. AI does the legwork. Guardrails you control decide what it's allowed to touch.

Have me install it for you

Seconds, not hours From detection to a blocked attacker, with autonomous response on

27 one-click fixes Across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Okta, Entra, CrowdStrike and more

$0 license No seats, no usage fees, no lock-in. You own all of it

The problem The next attack on your business won't be typed by a person.

Find out where you're exposed

A stolen key handed to an AI agent can fire sixty probing calls across twenty of your cloud services in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Swarms of fake identities can spray passwords at your admin accounts from a hundred places at once. By the time a person reads the first alert, the attacker has already moved on to the next system.

Most security tools were built for attackers who sleep. Argus was built for the ones that don't. It watches at machine speed, investigates at machine speed, and when you let it, responds at machine speed. It does all of that through one broker with approvals, dry runs, automatic rollback and a kill switch, so speed never turns into a new risk.

Letting software act on its own in production is a big decision, so Argus makes it a small, reversible one. The AI agents never touch your systems directly. They investigate with read-only access and can only propose. Every change, whether a person asks for it, an agent suggests it or a playbook fires, passes through the same broker.

Playbooks turn a detection into a fix with no human in the loop, then undo it on a timer unless you keep it. Approve, deny and roll back from Slack buttons.

Your team uses OpenAI and Anthropic with company-held keys, approved models, data-loss rules, budgets and prompt-injection flags. Staff get Argus keys; your real provider keys stay locked inside Argus.

Argus spots AI services in your network traffic, cloud accounts and SSO grants, keeps an inventory, and raises an alert for anything unreviewed or blocked.

Eight realistic agent attacks, from credential-spray swarms to a rogue Kubernetes agent, replayed in a sealed sandbox. Add "slow and low" evasion variants to find the gaps attackers would exploit.

An AI planner picks the tests, Argus runs them through scanners like Nuclei, ZAP and Trivy, then plans the next round from what it found. It stays inside your authorized scope, re-checked before every step.

Every vulnerability is checked against the CISA Known Exploited list and scored for exploit likelihood. Anything attackers are actively using jumps to the top of your queue.

Fake LLM keys, fake MCP servers, decoy agent rules files and planted prompt injections. An agent that bites gives itself away instantly.

New CrowdStrike and SentinelOne actions contain a device straight from Argus, with the same approvals, dry run and rollback as everything else.

$ git clone https://github.com/thomasunise/argus.git && cd argus $ python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate $ pip install -r requirements.txt $ cp .env.example .env && python scripts/generate_secrets.py --write $ uvicorn app.main:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080

Open 127.0.0.1:8080 and sign in with the admin login from .env. Run python scripts/seed_demo.py for synthetic demo data.

Going to production? There's Docker Compose for a pilot, a Helm chart for Kubernetes, and Terraform for AWS and Azure. Argus refuses to start in production mode without encryption keys, HTTPS, a write-once audit sink and SSO or two-factor, so an unsafe install can't happen by accident. The full checklist is in docs/DEPLOYMENT.md.

Clone it, deploy it, make it yours. Best for teams with security engineers who want to own every line.

Done for you I install it and hand it over running

For business owners and lean IT teams who want enterprise-grade protection without hiring a security team to run it. You get the outcome, not the project.

Argus questions, answered.

Including the ones a careful buyer should ask.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thirty minutes. We look at what you run, where you're exposed, and what an install takes. You leave with a plan, a timeline and a fixed price, or a straight answer that you don't need it yet.