Holistic AI grew out of AI audits and risk assessment; Cranium AI grew out of AI security. Both now reach across governance and runtime. Here is where each one is documented today, move by move.
Holistic AI is an AI governance platform with roots in AI audits, bias testing and regulatory readiness, and it now adds runtime controls through an SDK and an endpoint product called EndLayer.
Cranium AI is an AI security and governance platform that builds standards-based AI‑BOMs from source code, enforces policy on live prompts and responses, red teams models against OWASP categories, maps dependencies to known CVEs, and shares evidence with vendors and customers through AI Cards. Both cover governance and runtime; they differ on supply chain depth and third-party evidence.
Every capability on this page, scored the same way for both platforms and rolled up by AI Trust Loop stage.
Cranium AI17.5/ 20AI‑BOMs from code, CycloneDX and SPDX
Connector inventory plus endpoint agent
Live prompt and response monitoring
Sentinel agents and Guardian SDK
Frameworks plus runtime policy
Risk workflows, LL144 bias audits
Inline block or modify, OWASP-mapped red teaming
SDK warn or block, red teaming
AI Cards for vendors and customers
Audit-ready compliance reports
Scored across the 20 capabilities compared on this page: Documented = 1, Partial or Preview = 0.5, Unclear or Not documented = 0. Deployment and API rows are not scored. The capability list reflects what buyers ask about AI security and governance, and it includes areas where Holistic AI leads.
Holistic AI and Cranium AI overlap, but they were built to answer different first questions. Here is the short version.
| Cranium AI | Holistic AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI security and governance platform | AI governance platform, plus EndLayer endpoint product |
| Built for | CISOs and AI governance leads who need security and proof in one place | Enterprise risk, compliance and AI governance leaders |
| Company | Emerged from KPMG Studio in 2023. Short Hills, NJ | Founded 2020 as a UCL spin-out. San Francisco and London |
| How AI is found | Scans code repositories into AI‑BOMs; SIEM-based shadow AI view | Read-only connectors across cloud, code and SaaS; on-device agent |
| Runtime control | Inline Block, Modify or Pass on prompts and responses | Guardian SDK warn or block; EndLayer allow, warn, redact, block |
| Security testing | Arena red teaming mapped to OWASP; CVE mapping | Static and dynamic red teaming with a Defense Success Rate |
| Regulations | EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 | EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, NYC LL144, custom |
| Deployment | SaaS with US, EU and AU tenants | SaaS on AWS (London default), private and single-tenant options claimed; EndLayer self-hosted or air-gapped |
Disclosure: Cranium AI publishes this comparison. Every Holistic AI detail comes from public sources, mainly Holistic AI’s own website, documentation, marketplace listings and press releases, plus a few third-party publications where cited, checked on October 29, 2026. Where we could not find public evidence, we say “Not documented,” never “No.” Spot something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.
Organized by the AI Trust Loop: Discover, Observe, Govern, Secure and Prove. Cranium AI is held to the same standard as everyone else: if our docs don’t show it, we don’t claim it.
Find the AI you run
Scans GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps (cloud and self-managed) into AI‑BOMs of models, datasets, packages, agents and static system prompts.1,2
No AI‑BOM, CycloneDX or SPDX mention; the open-source Surface scanner outputs JSON.7
AgentSensor maps agents, tools, handoffs, guardrails and MCP servers from source code across six agent frameworks.5
Shadow AI view built from connected SIEM activity: AI provider access, AI-enabled SaaS, AI web apps and embedded AI. No endpoint agent or browser extension.10
Watch what it does
Guardian inspects every prompt and response between your AI apps and the model, in Listen or Enforce mode.13,14
Sentinel agents monitor for prompt injection, jailbreaks, leakage, hallucination and toxicity.3
Tool Inspector, session reconstruction and agentic analytics: autonomy score, tool invocations and agent-to-agent handoffs.15,16
Guardian SDK logs tool calls, access and cost incidents per session.17
Token and cost analytics per event, model and use case.18
Hold it to policy
EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001, with self-attestation and automated answer scoring.19
EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, NYC Local Law 144 and custom frameworks.3
AI Card reviews with approve, request changes or decline, plus an audit trail. No use-case intake questionnaires.20
Configurable sign-offs, approval chains, remediation tracking and deployment gates.3
Profiles set Block, Modify or Pass per signal, separately for prompts and responses, and per agent event type.21
Tool allow and block lists, access control and cost limits with warn or block thresholds.17
Defend it under attack
Enforce mode runs inline between your app and OpenAI, Anthropic Claude or AWS Bedrock models. New profiles start in Listen.14,22
PII, PHI, PCI, secrets, named entities and a custom blocklist, on prompts and responses.21,24
Direct attacks at runtime: jailbreaking, instruction override, prompt leaking, role impersonation, direct command injection and goal hijacking at runtime. Indirect injection is tested in Arena before release.24,26
Deterministic, non-LLM classifiers. Trace shows the text and training samples behind each verdict.27,28
EndLayer decides with deterministic rules and trained classifiers, no LLM. The core platform’s method is not documented.23
Arena runs fixed and adaptive multi-turn attacks across 9 LLM categories and 26 non-LLM task types, mapped to OWASP.29,26,30
Static and dynamic red teaming scored SAFE or UNSAFE with a Defense Success Rate. No OWASP or MITRE ATLAS mapping found.31
No dependency vulnerability mapping found.3
Scans imported model files for malicious code and unsafe serialization.
No model-file scanning found.3
Scans agent config files in repositories (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursor, Copilot instructions) for exfiltration endpoints and hidden Unicode. No endpoint hooks.33
Show the evidence
AI Cards request, respond and publish AI‑BOMs, framework results and vulnerability data; My Vendors tracks every card received.34,35
Inventory includes third-party AI and audits are offered as a service. No vendor request workflow or trust hub found.8
Framework and AI System PDF exports, AI Cards and audit trails on review decisions. Runtime evidence is not packaged into AI Cards.36,20
How it runs
Hosted in US, EU and AU regions. No self-hosted option is documented.38
“Documented” means the vendor’s public docs or product pages describe the capability as available. “Preview” covers beta, private preview and research preview. “Not documented” means we found no public evidence; it may exist behind a login or on a roadmap. Numbers link to the sources at the foot of this page.
The fastest way to see the difference is to follow one AI system through each platform.
Read-only connectors scan cloud, code, data and SaaS sources into a living AI inventory. EndLayer adds an on-device agent for AI tools and MCP servers.
Automated tests cover bias, robustness, privacy and efficacy, with static and dynamic red teaming and an Agent Graph.
Risk and compliance workflows, framework assessments and approvals map AI to the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001 and NYC LL144.
Sentinel agents watch runtime behavior; the Guardian SDK and EndLayer warn, redact or block on supported apps and devices.
CodeSensor and AgentSensor scan your repositories and build AI‑BOMs of the models, datasets, packages, agents and MCP servers in your code. A SIEM-fed Shadow AI view and AI Recon cover the AI you didn’t build.
Guardian watches live prompts, responses and tool calls between your apps and the model, with session reconstruction, agent analytics and cost tracking.
Map each AI system to the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001, and turn policy into runtime profiles that decide per signal.
Enforce mode blocks or modifies risky prompts and responses inline. Model files are scanned for malicious code, Arena red teams models before release and Arena Shield tests the guardrails.
AI Cards share AI‑BOMs, framework results and vulnerability data with customers, vendors and auditors, and flag when they fall out of sync.
Buyers trust comparisons that admit what the other platform does well. So do we.
Holistic AI runs NYC Local Law 144 bias audits listed in the UK Government’s AI assurance portfolio and offers deep regulatory content.42
EndLayer’s on-device agent finds AI tools, coding agents and MCP servers on devices, plus Microsoft 365 OAuth grants.9,12
The Guardian SDK sets tool allowlists, access control and cost limits across Claude Code, LangGraph, Google ADK and other frameworks.17
Holistic AI has published jailbreak audits of frontier models and runs a free LLM decision hub.31
Cranium AI exports AI‑BOMs as CycloneDX (agentic systems included) and SPDX, built from your code. Holistic AI documents an inventory, not a standard BOM.
Cranium ONE maps AI dependencies to known CVEs through OSV. Holistic AI does not document CVE mapping.
Arena findings map to the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and ML; Arena Shield exports tested guardrails as NeMo Guardrails YAML.
AI Cards and My Vendors run a request-and-respond workflow for third-party AI. Holistic AI does not document a vendor request workflow.
Running both? The platforms overlap more than most pairs here, so the choice usually comes down to supply chain depth versus audit services. If you run both, Holistic AI can own bias and LL144 audits while Cranium AI covers AI‑BOMs, runtime security and AI Card evidence. No native integration is documented.
Straight answers, kept current. Last verified .
Ask us anything →An enterprise AI governance platform founded in 2020 as a UCL spin-out, with offices in San Francisco and London. It is organized as Identify, Protect and Enforce, plus runtime Guardian agents, and in 2026 launched EndLayer, an endpoint product.
EndLayer is a product of Holistic AI launched in 2026. Its on-device agent discovers AI tools, coding agents and MCP servers, and applies allow, warn, redact, block or approval policies on supported tools. Its site currently invites visitors to join a waitlist.
No public documentation of AI‑BOM, CycloneDX or SPDX export was found as of October 2026. Cranium AI generates AI‑BOMs from source code and exports CycloneDX and SPDX.
Yes, through its Guardian SDK and the EndLayer device agent. Holistic AI says enforcement support depends on the tool and operating system. Cranium AI enforces Block, Modify or Pass inline between apps and the model.
Yes. It offers static and dynamic red teaming with SAFE or UNSAFE verdicts and a Defense Success Rate. No public OWASP or MITRE ATLAS mapping was found. Cranium AI’s Arena maps findings to OWASP.
The EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, NYC Local Law 144 and custom frameworks. Cranium AI maps to the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001.
Holistic AI does not publish pricing; it sells custom enterprise subscriptions through a demo-led process.
If you need standards-based AI‑BOMs, CVE mapping and vendor AI evidence alongside runtime security, Cranium AI covers all five moves of the AI Trust Loop in Cranium ONE.
How we built this page. We read Holistic AI’s public website, product documentation, developer docs, marketplace listings and press releases, and Cranium AI’s own documentation at docs.cranium.ai, on October 29, 2026. We compare documented capabilities. Announced or preview features are labeled as such, and analyst placements are left out. Product names and trademarks belong to their owners; Holistic AI has not reviewed or endorsed this page.
See how Cranium AI discovers, observes, governs, secures and proves every model, agent and vendor in your enterprise.
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