The AI Agent Control Planefor Autonomous AI
Autonomous agents don't wait for permission. FirstHelm is the layer that watches every action, blocks what breaks your rules, and calls a human when it matters.
Free tier available · No credit card required · Built for EU AI Act-aligned governance
A control layer — not another AI tool, but the system that governs all your AI tools.
What Is FirstHelm?
FirstHelm is an AI agent control plane that gives organisations human oversight of autonomous AI agents. It sits alongside the frameworks you already use — LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents, Microsoft Copilot Studio or anything custom — and adds the layer they don't have: one central place to register agents, decide what they're allowed to do, approve what matters, watch them live, and prove it all later.
One loop explains the whole product:
Connect
Register any AI agent in minutes. Framework-agnostic: if it can make an HTTP call, it works with FirstHelm.
Monitor
Watch every action in real time — tools called, rules triggered, decisions made. Not last week's log; right now.
Steer
Approve or reject mid-flight, constrain dangerous behaviour automatically, and dial autonomy up or down based on performance.
Prove
Every action, approval and intervention lands in a tamper-evident audit trail. When an auditor asks, you answer.
Learn — free, no signup
The AI Agent Governance Knowledge Base
Everything we know about governing autonomous agents — free to read, ungated, and useful whether or not you ever buy anything. Forty-five guides, comparisons and integration walkthroughs covering the questions your team, your auditors and your customers are starting to ask. Learn the concepts here; see the product in action when you're ready.
45
in-depth guides & resources
65,000+
words of expertise
0
signup walls — everything free to read
The definition, how agents actually work, and how they differ from chatbots.
Read the guide →Types of guardrail, real examples, and how to implement them.
Read the guide →The layer that governs agents across every framework. Where the term comes from.
Read the guide →Aligned with the frameworks that matter:
The World Is Regulating AI. Are You Ready?
Compliance isn't optional anymore. It's law.
2023
ISO/IEC 42001 published. The international standard for AI governance.
Feb 2025
EU AI Act prohibitions take effect. Banned AI practices and AI-literacy obligations become enforceable law.
Aug 2025
EU AI Act obligations for general-purpose AI models take effect.
Jan 2026
California SB 53 in force. Frontier-model developers must publish safety frameworks and report serious incidents.
Aug 2026
EU AI Act enforcement begins. The European AI Office gains enforcement powers over general-purpose AI and prohibited practices — investigations are already open. Fines reach €35M or 7% of global turnover.
Dec 2027
EU AI Act high-risk obligations apply (extended by the 2026 AI Omnibus). Mandatory risk management, logging and human oversight for high-risk systems.
Aug 2028
Final EU AI Act deadline: high-risk AI embedded in regulated products.
Why FirstHelm
FirstHelm was built for this moment. Every feature — constraints, approvals, audit trails, compliance exports — maps directly to regulatory requirements. You're not just monitoring agents. You're building the paper trail that regulators demand.
How FirstHelm Helps Your Company
Whether you're a 5-person startup or a 5,000-person enterprise.
When you're small, every decision matters. A single AI agent mistake can cost you customers, money, or credibility you can't afford to lose.
- Monitor your agent's spend in real-time — know exactly what you're paying for
- Set simple constraints (budget limits, forbidden actions) in under 60 seconds
- Get mobile-friendly alerts when your agent needs approval — no need to watch a dashboard
- Start with up to 2 agents on the Free plan, scale up as you grow
"FirstHelm gives small teams the safety net that enterprises spend millions building."
Why You Need to Monitor Your AI Agents
The question isn't whether your agents will make a mistake. It's when — and whether you'll catch it.
The Runaway Spend
Your coding agent is on a roll. It's been autonomously refactoring your codebase for 6 hours. But you didn't set a budget constraint. By the time you check, it's burned through £2,400 in API calls — on a task that should have cost £80. You're paying for an agent that went off the rails, and you didn't even know it was happening.
With FirstHelm: A budget constraint would have automatically blocked the agent at £100. You'd get an alert at £80. Total spend: £80, not £2,400.
The Hallucinated Email
Your customer support agent decides to email 3,000 customers about a 'new pricing update' that doesn't exist. It drafted the email, found the mailing list, and sent it — all autonomously. No human reviewed it. Now you have 3,000 confused customers and a PR problem.
With FirstHelm: The 'send email to all customers' action would have triggered an approval gate. You'd see the proposed email before it sends, review it, and reject it. Crisis averted.
The Midnight Data Wipe
Your data analysis agent is running at 2am. It decides the fastest way to 'clean up' for its next task is to delete the production database's staging table. It has database access. It executes the drop command. Your team wakes up to missing data and a broken staging environment.
With FirstHelm: A 'forbidden action' constraint blocking any command containing 'delete', 'drop', or 'format' would have stopped this instantly. The agent would have been blocked, a violation logged, and you'd see it in the morning dashboard — not in a 911 Slack message.
The Compliance Audit
A regulator asks: 'Show us every action your AI agent took in the last 6 months. Who approved the high-risk decisions? What constraints were in place?' You stare at scattered logs across OpenAI, LangChain, and your custom agent's terminal output. You have no unified record. You can't answer their questions. You're facing a €15 million fine.
With FirstHelm: One click. Export a compliance report — every action, every approval, every constraint, every intervention. Formatted to match EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2, UK GDPR, NIST AI RMF, and FCA requirements. Audit-ready in 30 seconds.
These aren't hypothetical. They're happening right now, in companies that deployed AI agents without oversight. FirstHelm makes sure they don't happen to you.
The FirstHelm Advantage
We're not a dashboard. We're a control plane.
| Feature | No Oversight | Traditional Monitoring | FirstHelm |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time visibility | |||
| Block dangerous actions | |||
| Approve before execution | |||
| Adaptive autonomy | |||
| Multi-framework support | |||
| Compliance-ready audit trail | |||
| Mid-flight intervention | |||
| Cost controls |
Human-First, Not Human-After
Most tools show you what your AI did. FirstHelm lets you control what it does — before, during, and after. Approve actions before they execute. Set constraints that block dangerous behaviour automatically. Intervene mid-mission with natural language. You're not reading a post-mortem; you're holding the steering wheel.
Adaptive Autonomy
Agents earn trust over time. FirstHelm automatically adjusts each agent's autonomy level based on its success rate, error rate, and intervention history. A reliable agent gets more freedom. A struggling agent gets more guardrails. No manual tuning required — the system learns what your agents can handle.
Framework-Agnostic
OpenAI today, Anthropic tomorrow, a custom agent next quarter. FirstHelm doesn't care what framework your agent runs on. If it can make an HTTP call, it works with FirstHelm. Switch your AI stack without switching your control plane.
Compliance Built In, Not Bolted On
The EU AI Act requires human oversight of high-risk AI systems. Article 14. It's not optional. FirstHelm was designed from day one to satisfy this requirement — every approval, every constraint, every intervention is logged and exportable. Compliance isn't a feature we added. It's the foundation we built on.
Works With Your Existing Stack
FirstHelm is framework-agnostic — any platform that can call a webhook or API plugs straight into the control plane. Connect. Steer. Monitor. Whatever they're built on.
Enterprise Platforms
No-Code & Low-Code Builders
And any custom agent — if it can send an HTTP request, FirstHelm can steer it. LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen and more.
How It Works
From zero to steering your agents in under 30 minutes.
Connect Your Agent
Register any AI agent with FirstHelm in minutes. Choose your framework (OpenAI, CrewAI, LangChain, Anthropic, or custom), set an initial autonomy level, and define what it can do. No code changes to your agent — just point it at FirstHelm's API.
⏱ 5 minutesSet Your Rules
Define constraints — budget limits, forbidden actions, approval gates, rate limits, time windows. These are the guardrails your agents operate within. FirstHelm enforces them automatically, in real-time. Your agents don't need to know about the rules; FirstHelm checks every action before it executes.
⏱ 10 minutesSteer in Real-Time
Watch your agents work on the live dashboard. When an agent wants to do something risky, you get an approval request. Approve, reject, or edit the action mid-flight. Adjust autonomy as trust builds. Export compliance reports when auditors ask. You're in control — not after the fact, but as it happens.
⏱ OngoingReady to start? Get Started Free
Built for Every Team
If AI agents are doing work for your company, FirstHelm is for you.
Founders & CEOs
You're betting your company on AI. FirstHelm makes sure that bet doesn't go sideways. Set the budget, set the rules, sleep at night.
CTOs & Engineering Leads
Your team is building with AI agents. You need visibility, control, and an audit trail. FirstHelm gives you all three without slowing down development.
Compliance & Risk Officers
Regulators are knocking. You need to demonstrate human oversight of every AI decision. FirstHelm's audit trail and compliance exports make audits painless.
Product Managers
You're shipping AI-powered features. You need to know what your agents are doing, how much they cost, and whether they're delivering. FirstHelm is your window.
Operations Teams
You're running AI workflows in production. When something goes wrong, you need to catch it fast and fix it faster. FirstHelm's real-time feed and approval queue are your early warning system.
AI/ML Engineers
You're building the agents. You need a way to test them safely, monitor their behaviour in production, and iterate on their constraints. FirstHelm is your sandbox and your safety net.
AI Agents Are Working. Who's Watching Them?
The Autonomy Gap
Companies are deploying AI agents at scale — coding assistants, research bots, customer support AI, autonomous workflows. But once deployed, these agents operate in a black box. They make decisions, spend money, call APIs, and take actions with zero human visibility. You find out what happened after the fact, when the damage is done.
The Compliance Drop
The EU AI Act is now in full enforcement. ISO 42001 and NIST AI RMF are the new standards. Regulators require demonstrable human oversight of AI systems — not promises, not policies, but proof. If you can't show who approved what, when, and why, you're not compliant. And non-compliance means fines of up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover.
The Multi-Tool Chaos
Your team uses OpenAI for content, CrewAI for research, LangChain for workflows, Anthropic for analysis. Each has its own dashboard, its own logs, its own way of working. There's no single place to see what all your agents are doing, no unified way to set safety rules across them all. You're managing chaos with spreadsheets.
FirstHelm was built to solve all three.
Start Free. Scale When You're Ready.
No hidden fees. No per-agent charges. Just per-user pricing.
Free
Perfect for trying FirstHelm with your first agents
- Up to 2 agents
- 1 active mission
- 7-day activity history
- Basic constraints
- Community support
Starter
For small teams getting started with AI automation
- Up to 10 agents
- 5 active missions
- All constraint types
- Audit trail export (CSV/JSON)
- Email support
Pro
For teams running multiple AI agents in production
- Unlimited agents
- Unlimited missions
- Compliance report exports
- Priority support
- 5 seats included
Enterprise
For organizations with heavy AI deployments and compliance requirements
- Everything in Pro
- SSO & SCIM
- UK/EEA data residency
- Custom constraints
- 99.9% SLA · dedicated success manager
All plans include real-time monitoring, approval workflows, and audit trails. Upgrade, downgrade, or cancel anytime. All prices are in GBP and exclude VAT.
Ready to Put Humans Back at the Helm?
Join the companies using FirstHelm to steer their AI — safely, compliantly, and with confidence.
Free tier · No credit card required · Setup in 30 minutes