Problem

AI agents increasingly need access to many external services, but giving an agent raw API keys creates a severe security and operational risk: the agent can read, log, misuse, or exfiltrate credentials if it is compromised or manipulated by prompt injection. The direct economics are the potentially high cost of unauthorized GitHub, Stripe, cloud, email, or database actions, plus the operational burden of distributing, rotating, and revoking secrets across agents. OneCLI’s clearest use case is an autonomous coding agent working in an untrusted repository: even if a malicious instruction convinces it to send credentials to an attacker-controlled endpoint, a placeholder credential is useless and the real key is not exposed.

The second problem is that model instructions are not reliable security controls. Prompts can ask an agent not to delete emails, make payments, or modify production systems, but those instructions remain suggestions to the model. Teams need deterministic controls outside the agent that can prevent destructive actions, constrain access to particular services, and provide an auditable record of credentialed requests.

Product / Service

OneCLI is an open-source credential vault and network gateway for AI agents. An agent runs normally through an HTTPS proxy, using placeholder credentials; OneCLI authenticates the agent, matches each request against host-and-path rules, decrypts the appropriate credential at request time, injects it into the outbound request, and forwards the call. Secrets are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, while agents never receive the underlying keys. The dashboard manages agents, credentials, rules, and audit logs, and the system can be used with standard HTTP clients, CLI tools, MCP calls, SDKs, or containerized agents without changing application code.

The gateway also acts as a policy enforcement layer: teams can block operations, rate-limit activity, require human approval for sensitive requests, and scope credentials by agent or project. OneCLI is delivered as a hosted cloud service with a free tier and paid Team, Scale, and Enterprise plans, while its community edition can be self-hosted with Docker; the commercial self-hosted offering supports VPC or on-premises deployment. The benefit is a single control point that reduces secret exposure while making agent permissions revocable, inspectable, and enforceable at the network layer.

Market

OneCLI competes in the emerging AI-agent security market, specifically the intersection of agent identity and access management, secrets management, runtime security, and policy enforcement. Its closest established adjacent competitor is HashiCorp Vault, a general-purpose secrets platform. OneCLI positions itself as more focused on AI-agent credential injection: unlike a conventional secret manager that typically delivers a raw secret to the workload, OneCLI injects credentials into individual requests and is designed for fast setup and host/path-scoped access. It can also complement Vault, with Vault handling broader secret lifecycle management and OneCLI handling agent-side injection without exposing raw credentials.

The product appears early but has meaningful public developer traction. The repository snapshot available in late July 2026 showed 2,928 GitHub stars and 168 forks under an Apache-2.0 license, and NanoClaw announced that it was adopting OneCLI as its default credential and proxying layer. OneCLI has published a clear commercial model—free, $199-per-month Team, $499-per-month Scale, and custom Enterprise plans—but the reviewed sources do not disclose revenue, paying-customer counts, or retention, so its revenue status cannot be confirmed as either pre-revenue or commercially proven.