The layer between AI agents and the systems they touch.
Lictorate is the name behind Vanzik, the open-source firewall that checks every agent tool call against policy before it runs.
Authority walks ahead.
A lictor was the Roman officer who walked ahead of a magistrate carrying the fasces, the bound rods that signalled authority, and cleared the way for him. The rods in our mark come from that job, and so does the rule behind everything here: lex antecedit actum, policy precedes action.
Enforcement, not detection.
Agents read, decide and act on real systems with no person between the intent and the effect. Logs and evals tell you what already happened. Lictorate works on the step before that: a deterministic check, in the runtime, that a long enough message can’t argue with. The full argument is in the thesis.
The core stays open.
Vanzik's full runtime is Apache 2.0. Vanzik Cloud is a separate hosted layer and never gates it.
Your data stays with you.
Self-hosted by default, with no outbound calls, telemetry or update check.
Claims follow the code.
Limits and non-goals are published in the threat model alongside the benchmarks.
Narrow on purpose.
One product, taken deep, before anything else ships.