CAIN-42 CAIN StudioHow CAIN-42 compares · Policy & authorization
CAIN-42 vs AWS Cedar
Cedar is AWS's authorization language and engine, the basis of AgentCore Policy. It evaluates requests against policies and is designed to be analyzable.
What AWS Cedar does well
- A modern, analyzable authorization language.
- Deep integration into AWS services.
- Designed for correctness and tooling.
What CAIN-42 does differently
- Enforces at the tool-call boundary, before anything runs.
- Orders authorization through a Byzantine quorum (3-of-4): one "yes" is never enough.
- Leaves a per-action signed receipt you can verify offline with a clean-room verifier.
- Authority continuity: a change to the model, tool, memory, skill or delegation forces a re-check.
- Self-serve from $19.75/mo; runs hosted, self-hosted or air-gapped.
Capability difference
| Capability | CAIN-42 | AWS Cedar | Source (verified 2026-10-14) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Runtime governance in the execution path | Authorization language and engine | AWS source page verified 2026-10-14 |
| Policy that can only narrow authority | Yes | Policy as authored | |
| Byzantine-ordered authorization (quorum cert) | Yes — 3-of-4 PBFT quorum certificate | Not in scope | |
| Per-action signed receipt, offline-verifiable | Yes — Ed25519, hash-chained, offline-verifiable | Not in scope | |
| Cross-cloud authority continuity | Yes — a change forces an authority re-check | AWS context | |
| Public entry price | $19.75/mo self-serve | Free within AWS |
When to pick which
Pick Cedar inside AWS. Pick CAIN-42 for cloud-agnostic authority continuity and action evidence.
Based on each vendor's public homepage and product pages, last reviewed 2026-10-14. No affiliation and no claim about their internals. "No*" means we found no public documentation of that capability, not that the vendor cannot do it.