Orca provides safety layer for autonomous AI agents

Independent developer Christopher Karani released Orca, an open-source runtime safety layer that intercepts and can block or require approval for risky actions by autonomous AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, according to the project's GitHub README. Orca sits between an agent and the host machine, checking shell commands, file access, and network calls against a policy file before execution, blocking commands like rm -rf, git reset --hard, or terraform destroy unless explicitly allowed. Released under the Apache 2.0 license and installable via Homebrew, the tool targets a real gap for practitioners giving agents unsupervised filesystem and shell access. As of publication the project has just 21 GitHub stars and no independent press coverage, so its real-world adoption and effectiveness remain unproven.