What Vanta and Drata Actually Automate
Vanta and Drata's publicly described product scope covers evidence collection for organizational frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. They do this through integrations with infrastructure, identity, and ticketing systems, polling those systems for periodic control state rather than observing behavior as it happens. No independently verified documentation confirms that either platform natively ingests AI agent tool-call logs.
Why AI Agents Introduce a Different Compliance Surface
Organizational security frameworks were built to evaluate infrastructure configuration, access control, and process discipline at a point in time. Autonomous AI agents introduce a different question: not whether a system is configured correctly, but whether an individual agent action, such as a specific tool call, was authorized, scoped correctly, and attributable to an identity. That is a runtime question, and it sits outside what periodic evidence polling was designed to answer.
How Runtime Governance Works Differently
Trussed operates at the point of execution. It enforces policy, identity, and permission controls on AI agent behavior as actions occur, rather than reconstructing state after the fact. The output is an action-level audit record: a log of what an agent attempted, what it was permitted to do, and what was actually executed.
Control Point Comparison
| Vanta / Drata | Trussed | Combined coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Automates evidence collection for organizational and infrastructure controls. | Enforces runtime policy, identity, and permission controls on AI agent behavior. | GRC evidence plus agent-level audit trails, mapped to AI-specific frameworks. |
Where the Two Categories Overlap and Where They Diverge
ISO 42001 is a distinct management-system certification focused on the AI lifecycle, with its own audit process. It does not replace SOC 2 or ISO 27001, which address broader organizational information security, and neither category replaces the other. For organizations running autonomous AI agents, a GRC platform and a runtime governance tool are typically used together, which means coordination is required to reconcile evidence chain-of-custody between the two systems ahead of an audit.