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Brex built its AI agent policy by watching what agents actually do, not by writing rules first
Agentic frameworks like OpenClaw face challenges in enterprise-scale deployment due to security concerns with real credentials. Traditional guardrails proved insufficient for controlling agent actions. Brex developed CrabTrap, an internal platform acting as an HTTP/HTTPS proxy to intercept and examine network traffic. This proxy uses a large language model as a judge to approve or deny agent requests based on policy rules. Brex's CEO advocates for shifting agent governance to a centralized network control plane rather than relying solely on SDK-level permissions or model guardrails. Existing solutions struggled with the trade-off between agent capability and safety, often being bypassed or overly restrictive. CrabTrap operates at the transport layer, making it framework, language, and API agnostic without requiring SDK wrappers. The platform initially combines static rules with an LLM judge for less common requests, activating the judge on a small percentage of traffic. Brex bootstrapped its policies by observing real agent behavior and refining them, significantly improving policy accuracy. CrabTrap's LLM judge was designed to resist prompt injection by structuring all user-controlled content as escaped JSON objects. The platform has instilled organizational confidence, enabling broader agent deployment and empowering users with agent management. CrabTrap also revealed agent noise, leading to policy tuning and agent optimization, acting as both an enforcement and discovery tool. Brex released CrabTrap as open-source, aiming for community contributions to enhance features like authentication and escalation workflows. The key takeaway for other builders is to proactively address infrastructure gaps and own the problems rather than waiting for industry solutions.