AI security for manufacturing
AI security for manufacturing: agents on the plant floor, IP off the table
Maintenance copilots, quality agents, and supply-chain assistants live at the IT/OT boundary — where most manufacturers have no governance function at all. The data they touch is your crown jewels: process parameters, supplier pricing, engineering records, operator identities.
DataShield governs what agents can reach instead of trusting what they'll do: sensitive fields tokenized at ingest, every governed tool call scoped to agent identity with mid-session revocation, and a tamper-evident audit chain that shows exactly which agent touched which dataset.
OT data protection for AI agents: the three exposures, mapped to mechanisms
Process IP leaking into prompts
Recipes, tolerances, and supplier terms are trade secrets only while you control access. DataShield classifies and tokenizes sensitive fields at ingest with deterministic, join-preserving tokens — a copilot correlates downtime with a supplier's parts without ever seeing the supplier's name or pricing. See Ontology.
Agents with plant-wide reach
An agent built for one line shouldn't read the whole historian. Every governed tool call passes token scope ceiling, authority tier, and a mid-session revocation re-check before metered dispatch — and delegated keys can never confer more scope than their owner intends. See Auth.
No record for auditors or customers
Defense primes and automotive OEMs increasingly audit their suppliers' AI usage. A SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints gives you per-call evidence of what each agent accessed — verification distinguishes tampering, insertion, deletion, and truncation. Run it on a sample log.
NIST AI RMF in manufacturing — and CMMC when AI tools touch CUI
The NIST AI Risk Management Framework asks manufacturers to govern AI across predictive maintenance, quality, and supply chain — and its Generative AI Profile (AI 600-1) names the industrial risks specifically: prompt injection through operator interfaces, hallucinated maintenance instructions, model drift against modified equipment. The framework's govern-map-measure loop needs one input above all: a trustworthy record of what AI systems actually did with what data.
Defense-adjacent manufacturers carry a harder requirement: under CMMC Level 2, AI tools processing CUI must meet the 110 controls of NIST SP 800-171 — access control, least privilege, and audit accountability included. An agent stack with unscoped data access and mutable logs fails that on its face.
DataShield deploys self-hosted, on your network. No cloud dependency between your agents and your process data, your keys in your custody — the deployment model OT environments require. Read the architecture and the security posture, including the threat model and key-management story.
Manufacturing buyer questions
Does DataShield connect directly to PLCs or SCADA?
No. DataShield is a data-plane governance layer, not an OT protocol gateway. It governs the datasets your agents query — historian extracts, MES records, supplier and engineering data — after ingest into governed, tokenized datasets exposed over MCP. Control-network segmentation stays your OT team's domain.
Can agents still correlate across production data if identifiers are tokenized?
Yes. Tokens are deterministic and join-preserving: the same supplier, part, or operator always maps to the same token, so cross-dataset correlation works while names, terms, and identities stay out of the agent's context.
How does this help with a customer or CMMC audit?
You hand over evidence, not assertions: per-tool-call records attributed to agent identity, sealed into a hash chain whose verification report distinguishes tampering, insertion, deletion, and truncation. The verification schema is published on the architecture page, and you can test it yourself.
We run air-gapped or restricted networks. Does this work?
DataShield is built for self-hosted deployment on your infrastructure with your keys — no SaaS dependency in the data path. Deployment specifics belong in a quote conversation: get an instant quote.
Process IP tokenized at ingest, agent access scoped per call, audit evidence a prime contractor will accept — on your network.
Get an instant quoteYou've seen the proof
Ready for a number? Scope your deployment and we'll price it against your own economics.
Get your quote →