Why Helio exists
AI agents already do more than answer questions. They call APIs, spend money, change customer records, and deploy code. Once software can act, capability is only half the question. The other half is what is this agent allowed to do, under which conditions, and who can prove what happened.
Built-in controls help inside one model provider or framework. They do not carry one policy across Claude, ChatGPT, LangChain, CrewAI, and the systems those agents reach. Stripe knows a payment call arrived. It does not know whether the agent completed the required lookup or already exhausted a shared budget.
Helio sits in that gap. It keeps policy, evidence, budgets, approvals, and the audit trail outside the model's context. The software is open source, runs on your infrastructure, and treats governance like code: declarative, versionable, and reviewable.
How we build
Operating principles
These are the rules we use when a product decision gets difficult.
Plain text over magic
Config is YAML you can read. Every decision can be traced to a matching rule and an audit record. No hidden model makes policy decisions.
Boring is good
Predictable beats clever. Rules apply in the order you wrote them. No ML in the hot path, no inference, no surprises during incidents.
Local-first
You run Helio on your own infrastructure. Tool calls don't leave your network unless you choose to send them. We don't ingest your traffic.
Refuse, but explain
When Helio blocks an action it tells the agent what failed and what would unblock it. Errors should teach, not stonewall.
Compatibility over reinvention
MCP already connects agents and tools. Helio stays inside that protocol: change the endpoint configuration; keep your agent and server code.
One codebase, one license
Every software feature ships under Apache 2.0: the proxy, dashboard, policy engine, approvals, and audit trail. Paid help is for services and support, not access to the product.
Company
Contact
Setting up Helio? Start with the five-minute quickstart. Found a bug or have a feature request? Open a GitHub issue.
For everything else, email hello@helio.so or follow @get_helio for project updates.
Running agents that touch money, customer data, or production systems? Talk to the maintainers.
Status
Where the project is today
Helio is in beta. The proxy, bundled dashboard, policies, cross-tool budgets, approvals, evidence checks, drift detection, and audit trail are working today. Before 1.0, releases may include breaking configuration or data changes. The changelog is the source of truth for each release.