What Sets Them Apart
AI security is a rapidly evolving discipline that requires protection at multiple layers. Teleport Beams and Lakera address fundamentally different attack surfaces: Beams secures what AI agents can do in production infrastructure, while Lakera secures what inputs AI models receive and outputs they produce. Understanding this distinction is crucial for building comprehensive AI security strategies.
Teleport Beams and Lakera at a Glance
Teleport Beams focuses on the infrastructure access layer. When AI agents need to interact with servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, or internal APIs, Beams provides cryptographically verified sessions with short-lived certificates, granular policy enforcement, and immutable audit trails. Every agent action is authenticated and authorized against declarative policies that restrict which commands can be executed, which resources can be reached, and what data can be modified.
Lakera operates at the model interaction layer, protecting against prompt injection attacks, jailbreaking attempts, and harmful content generation. Lakera Guard inspects prompts before they reach the model and filters outputs before they reach users. This protects against adversarial inputs that could manipulate the model into producing unintended or harmful responses.
The threat models are complementary rather than competing. A compromised AI agent could face both types of attack simultaneously: a prompt injection could cause the agent to hallucinate a dangerous command, and without infrastructure-level controls, that command could execute on production systems. Using both tools creates defense-in-depth: Lakera prevents the malicious input, and Beams prevents execution even if the input filter fails.
Zero-trust Integration, Prompt Security, and Scope
Beams integrates with Teleport's mature zero-trust access platform, which already protects thousands of organizations' infrastructure. This means agent access policies are managed alongside human access policies in a single platform, with consistent audit logging and compliance reporting. Lakera provides a standalone API-based service that integrates into the LLM request pipeline.
Deployment models differ significantly. Teleport Beams is available on Teleport Enterprise and Cloud tiers with the open-source core providing foundational access management. Lakera Guard offers a cloud-hosted API with pay-per-call pricing. For organizations requiring on-premises deployment, Teleport's self-hosted option provides more flexibility.
The enterprise readiness of each tool reflects different maturity levels. Teleport has raised over $110 million and has been building secure access tooling for over a decade, with a proven track record in regulated industries. Lakera is a newer entrant focused specifically on AI security, with growing but less established enterprise adoption.
AI Agent Access and Pricing
For AI agents that need to access production infrastructure — deploying code, querying databases, managing Kubernetes resources, or responding to incidents — Teleport Beams is essential. For AI applications that process user inputs and generate text, images, or other content, Lakera Guard provides critical input/output filtering.
Observability integration also differs. Beams leverages OpenTelemetry for monitoring agent behavior patterns, integrating with existing observability stacks. Lakera provides its own dashboard for monitoring threat detection rates and blocked attempts. Both approaches offer visibility into AI security posture but through different operational lenses.