Cisco's Donation of Project CodeGuard to CoSAI: A New Chapter in Securing AI-Generated Code

Cisco has donated Project CodeGuard to the Coalition for Secure AI. Omar Santos, CoSAI project governing board co-chair, announced the move. Cisco originally developed the framework to address internal security challenges with AI-assisted development. The company open-sourced Project CodeGuard in October 2025. The donation places the project under CoSAI stewardship so the framework can evolve through community governance. Project CodeGuard is a model-agnostic security framework. It embeds secure-by-default practices directly into AI coding agent workflows. The framework provides AI coding agents with comprehensive security skills and rules that guide them to generate secure code from the first keystroke. The approach does not rely on post-generation scanning. Project CodeGuard also supports code review and remediation. It works with leading AI coding agents including Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Cursor, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot. Rules serve as plain-text instruction files that guide agents on how to generate, review and modify code. Agent skills function as reusable knowledge components that allow agents to pull relevant expertise on demand. The framework uses both mechanisms to deliver security guidance such as rules that prevent hardcoded credentials and skills that agents invoke for tasks like certificate validation.