One other day, one other new AI agent harness is launched.
Solely this time, it is one which goals to unravel a rising enterprise drawback as AI brokers proliferate: enabling better developer management of brokers and instruments, whereas lowering value.
TrueFoundry, a San Francisco B2B machine studying startup co-founded in 2021 by former Meta engineers, has launched its personal customized TrueForge harness beneath the permissive MIT License on Github. Thus, it may be used with any of a developer (or their mum or dad enterprise’s) most popular AI fashions, forked, modified, self-hosted and included into business merchandise.
The company states in a blog post that when it used TrueForge paired with the open supply GLM-5.2 LLM to efficiently full 11 of 14 duties on DevRev’s Enterprise-Bench — testing multi-step instrument use throughout CRM, problem monitoring, and doc administration techniques — it value 75% lower than reaching the identical outcomes with Anthropic’s Claude Managed Brokers harness powered by Claude Opus 4.8 ($2.90 in comparison with $11.80).
Utilizing the identical mannequin in every harness, Opus 4.8, TrueFoundry nonetheless claims a price financial savings of roughly 30% utilizing TrueForge in comparison with Claude Managed Brokers ($8.50 vs $11.80).
Why is TrueFoundry giving this powerfully environment friendly harness away at no cost?
“We’ve had this ask from a bunch of shoppers,” stated Anuraag Gutgutia, TrueFoundry’s co-founder and COO, in an unique interview with VentureBeat. “You could have a capability the place you usher in brokers and MCPs — can we additionally get one thing the place you may really launch these managed brokers? I believe that’s the want we’re satisfying. It’s not a substitute. Individuals will use this alongside different harnesses, just like the cloud-managed ones or the commercial-provider-managed ones, however this may function a approach for folks to make use of them in a vendor-neutral approach and likewise at a decrease value.”
Certainly, TrueFoundry already affords a paid “AI Gateway” for enterprises centrally controlling mannequin and MCP entry, credentials, permissions, budgets and observability. TrueForge, against this, handles what occurs above that gateway: the loop that lets a mannequin repeatedly purpose, name instruments, obtain outcomes and proceed working till a process is full.
For enterprise builders, the sensible proposition is that they will begin domestically with a single command and SQLite, then transfer the identical agent harness right into a shared deployment utilizing Docker Compose or Helm with Postgres and Redis.
TrueFoundry explicitly warns that the native configuration is meant just for use on a developer’s machine, not as an internet-facing manufacturing service.
Gutgutia stated the corporate finally desires its AI Gateway to turn into the frequent layer beneath whichever brokers and harnesses an enterprise chooses.
“There might be a set of corporations that may use our harness as the best way to launch managed brokers,” he stated, whereas others might proceed utilizing Claude, different open-source harnesses or inside techniques. “However all that site visitors ought to nonetheless be flowing by our gateway.”
Context administration is the place TrueForge tries to chop waste
TrueForge’s structure facilities on context engineering — controlling how a lot info will get despatched again into the mannequin on each step of an agent run.
That features delaying the loading of MCP instrument schemas till they’re wanted, delegating remoted duties to subagents, transferring outsized instrument outcomes into recordsdata as a substitute of stuffing them into the energetic context window, processing structured outcomes by code, and routinely compacting long-running conversations.
The documentation units the default compaction threshold at 50,000 tokens, although it may be modified per agent.
TrueForge additionally treats the sandbox otherwise from runtimes that preserve an agent inside an remoted setting all through its run. The core agent loop stays on the TrueForge server; a sandbox is provisioned as a instrument solely when the agent must execute code or work with recordsdata. TrueFoundry says that reduces pointless compute and permits a server to run extra brokers concurrently.
The corporate argues these selections straight cut back mannequin spending.
How TrueForge compares to Claude Managed Brokers and different main orchestration harnesses
Kind / focus
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: Basic-purpose manufacturing agent harness designed for enterprise deployments.
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DeepSeek Harness: Open-source agent harness, at present positioned as a developer preview.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: Coding-focused agent harness designed primarily for software-engineering workflows.
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LangChain Deep Brokers: Basic-purpose agent harness constructed on LangGraph.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Totally managed manufacturing agent runtime operated by Anthropic.
License
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: MIT.
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DeepSeek Harness: MIT.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: Apache 2.0.
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LangChain Deep Brokers: MIT.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Proprietary.
Value
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: The open-source harness itself is free. Mannequin, sandbox and infrastructure prices are separate. TrueFoundry additionally affords an elective business governance layer by its broader platform.
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DeepSeek Harness: No harness license payment. Customers individually pay for no matter mannequin suppliers and infrastructure they use.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: The CLI is open supply. Underlying mannequin/API or subscription prices are separate, OpenAI says round $100–$200 per developer per 30 days, though precise spending varies considerably with mannequin alternative
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LangChain Deep Brokers: Open supply, with mannequin and infrastructure bills separate. LangChain additionally affords elective business companies by LangSmith.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Claude tokens consumed plus $0.08 per operating session-hour, with runtime metered to the millisecond.
Mannequin flexibility
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: Vendor-neutral and designed round bring-your-own-model assist.
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DeepSeek Harness: Multi-provider and never restricted to DeepSeek fashions.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: Helps configurable inference endpoints, together with OpenAI-compatible companies and local-model choices.
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LangChain Deep Brokers: Broad multi-provider assist by the LangChain ecosystem.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Claude-centric.
Deployment
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: Can run domestically as a single course of with SQLite, then transfer right into a manufacturing deployment utilizing Docker Compose or Helm with Postgres and Redis.
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DeepSeek Harness: Designed for native or self-hosted operation.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: Primarily an area CLI expertise, alongside OpenAI-hosted Codex services.
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LangChain Deep Brokers: May be self-hosted or deployed by LangChain and LangSmith infrastructure.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Anthropic manages the runtime and infrastructure.
Key options
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: MCP and power orchestration, subagents, human approval checkpoints, persistent classes, context compaction, large-result offloading, Code Mode, generative UI, tracing and a sandbox-as-a-tool structure.
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DeepSeek Harness: Pluggable fashions, instruments, session storage and agent loops, together with sandboxing, permissions, approval gates and abilities.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: Agent loop, repository and file operations, shell execution, MCP instruments, sandboxing, permissions, approvals and context administration.
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LangChain Deep Brokers: Planning, subagents, abilities, filesystem-based context administration, persistent reminiscence, human-in-the-loop controls, MCP assist and a number of sandbox backends.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Managed execution environments, persistence, instruments, sandboxing and infrastructure for long-running brokers.
Key differentiator
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TrueFoundry TrueForge: Its strongest distinction is the mix of an open-source, vendor-neutral harness with a transparent path from native improvement to a shared manufacturing runtime, plus an elective enterprise governance aircraft by TrueFoundry.
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DeepSeek Harness: Emphasizes deep modularity. Main elements of the runtime, together with fashions, instruments, storage and the agent loop, are designed to be replaceable plugins.
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OpenAI Codex CLI: Stands out as a extremely developed software-engineering-specific harness reasonably than a general-purpose enterprise agent server.
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LangChain Deep Brokers: Advantages from the broader LangChain and LangGraph ecosystem and affords a mature open-source path for constructing general-purpose brokers.
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Anthropic Claude Managed Brokers: Minimizes operational burden by having Anthropic handle the runtime, however trades that comfort for tighter mannequin and platform coupling.
Open supply doesn’t routinely imply ruled
For enterprise consumers, one of the crucial necessary distinctions is between TrueForge by itself and TrueForge related to TrueFoundry’s business AI Gateway.
The open-source harness can run independently. However it doesn’t magically inherit a corporation’s enterprise entry insurance policies by itself.
“In case you are utilizing simply the open supply model of our agent harness, sure, you will have to place the fitting controls therein or in entrance of another inside management system,” Gutgutia instructed VentureBeat.
When paired with TrueFoundry’s gateway, the corporate says brokers can inherit the identities and entry controls already hooked up to fashions, MCP servers, instruments, abilities and different brokers. Gutgutia described the gateway because the place the place enterprise SSO, identification suppliers and granular permissions may be centrally enforced reasonably than reimplemented individually for each agent.
That distinction is prone to be necessary for platform engineering groups evaluating the undertaking. TrueForge is free software program; TrueFoundry’s governance layer is the business management aircraft round it.
TrueFoundry says NetApp was a beta consumer of the harness and contributed necessities throughout improvement. Gutgutia stated NetApp’s IT group has used the know-how for incident response and sooner ticket triage, whereas additionally exposing inside brokers as self-service instruments for builders. He additionally recognized Automattic as an early consumer.
Background on TrueFoundry and its enterprise up to now
TrueFoundry was based in 2021 to assist enterprises deploy and function machine-learning fashions, together with Kubernetes-based mannequin serving, coaching and infrastructure administration.
Its three co-founders — Nikunj Bajaj, Abhishek Choudhary and Anuraag Gutgutia — beforehand labored at Meta and WorldQuant, respectively.
Gutgutia stated the founders’ frequent expertise was working round mature techniques the place infrastructure and controls had been designed to stop pricey errors — an concept they believed would turn into more and more necessary as AI moved into manufacturing inside massive corporations.
As generative AI unfold by enterprise software program, TrueFoundry expanded from that MLOps basis towards managing LLM purposes and, more and more, the fashions, instruments and brokers round them.
By 2025, the corporate had made its AI Gateway a central a part of the enterprise: a layer sitting between enterprise purposes and mannequin suppliers that handles routing, authentication, entry controls, observability, budgets, guardrails and failover.
That evolution has been backed by roughly $21 million in exterior financing. TrueFoundry raised a $19 million Collection A in February 2025 led by Intel Capital, with participation from present buyers Eniac Ventures and Peak XV’s Surge, in addition to Bounce Capital and angel buyers together with Gokul Rajaram and Mohit Aron. The spherical introduced whole financing to about $21 million, based on Intel Capital’s announcement.
On the time, TrueFoundry stated its buyer base had grown fourfold 12 months over 12 months and that it was managing greater than 1,000 clusters for machine-learning workloads.
The enterprise has since turn into more and more oriented round large-scale enterprise AI site visitors. In VentureBeat’s January 2026 coverage of TrueFoundry’s TrueFailover launch, the corporate stated it had greater than 30 paid clients worldwide, had exceeded $1.5 million in annual recurring income in the course of the prior 12 months and was processing greater than 10 billion requests per 30 days by its AI Gateway.
Prospects and deployments cited by TrueFoundry have included NetApp, Siemens Healthineers, ResMed, Automation Wherever, Nvidia, Games24x7 and others; Gutgutia additionally named NetApp, Siemens, Synopsys and Automation Wherever amongst Fortune 1000 organizations working with the corporate in his interview with VentureBeat.
TrueFoundry has additionally been increasing by acquisition. In June 2026 it acquired UK-based Seldon AI, a longtime MLOps vendor whose Seldon Core software program has been used for manufacturing mannequin serving and inference.
Because the acquisition reveals, reasonably than treating conventional ML, LLMs, instruments and brokers as separate infrastructure classes, TrueFoundry is attempting to place them behind a standard deployment and governance layer.
TrueForge extends that technique upward into the agent runtime itself. Till now, TrueFoundry’s business heart of gravity has largely been the management aircraft beneath enterprise AI workloads — deciding which customers and purposes can entry which fashions and instruments, routing requests, implementing coverage, monitoring spend and preserving companies accessible.
TrueForge offers the corporate an open-source runtime above that layer the place brokers can really execute. Gutgutia described the connection as complementary: organizations can run TrueForge independently or proceed utilizing different agent harnesses, whereas TrueFoundry’s longer-term enterprise alternative is to supply the frequent governance and infrastructure beneath whichever brokers enterprises select.
