Data privacy engineering company Ethyca Inc. today launched Astralis, a platform that governs how enterprise artificial intelligence models and agents use company data in real time.

The company is pitching the product as an answer to a widening gap between how fast enterprises are deploying AI agents and how well their compliance teams can keep track of them. Ethyca counts The New York Times Co., Ramp Business Corp. and Condé Nast parent Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. among the companies it works with.

Governance has quietly become one of the main brakes on enterprise AI. As autonomous systems multiply inside large organizations, regulators are more often asking why a given system reached a given dataset and many companies have no answer. By Ethyca’s account, that gap is why AI projects stall out before they reach production. Gartner Inc. has forecast the average global Fortune 500 company will be running more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, from fewer than 15 only last year.

Astralis works through two parts. Its Large Language Regulatory Model automates privacy and AI assessments, work the company said previously ran 40 to 60 hours per assessment and now takes 20 to 40 minutes. The second piece, a Purpose-Based Access Control engine, screens data requests as they arrive. It ties each grant to the reason behind the request so data gets used only for the purpose it was approved for.

The pairing is meant to let companies judge AI risk quickly and keep firm limits on their data. Ethyca frames it as a replacement for periodic compliance reviews, which capture a system at a single moment and fall out of date as rules and business needs move on. The platform tracks regulatory developments continuously and pings internal experts when it needs more information.

Astralis runs entirely inside a customer’s own cloud environment, so sensitive data never leaves the organization’s control. Ethyca said one large U.S. financial institution already uses the platform to automate 6,000 requests per second, or hundreds of millions of governed data decisions each month.

“Organizations are not ready for the AI onslaught,” said founder and Chief Executive Cillian Kieran. “Risk teams managing thousands of requests today will soon face millions. This is holding up AI adoption.”

Kieran said the promise of enterprise AI will not be realized unless companies solve the governance problem underpinning it and that most have not yet grasped the full scope of the challenge. “Automation is the only answer,” he said.

The launch comes as AI rules are rewritten in both the U.S. and Europe, leaving legal chiefs to rebuild governance programs around regulations that keep moving. Julie Brill, a former U.S. Federal Trade Commission commissioner, former Microsoft Corp. chief privacy officer and Ethyca board member, said companies that build governance into their data infrastructure will end up treating compliance as the layer AI runs on rather than the thing slowing it down.

Founded in 2018, Ethyca built its early business on privacy engineering tools before extending into AI governance. Astralis is available now.

Photo: Ethyca