Seattle – October 14, 2026 -- Chainguard has launched Chainguard Checks in Beta, a continuous verification engine that returns signed, trusted test results to developers and AI agents in seconds, before code reaches a pull request.
The product targets a bottleneck created by agentic development. Traditional CI was built for developers who push code a few times a day, while agents iterate constantly. Every change lands in the same queue, and results often return after the agent has lost its working context. Teams also pay repeatedly for the same setup work.
Chainguard Checks suspends agent sessions during test runs to halt compute use
Chainguard Checks works with the newly launched Chainguard Workspaces. An agent session suspends while checks execute, which stops compute consumption. It then resumes in seconds, with structured failure logs injected directly into its context so it can iterate until tests pass.
Every passing run generates a signed attestation that travels with the code. Downstream merge gates can verify the attestation and merge immediately, without re-running the CI test suite. Chainguard says this removes queue time and redundant compute spend.
Runners hold no long-lived credentials and run in isolated microVMs
Chainguard also targets a security weakness in conventional CI. Runners typically combine long-lived secrets with untrusted code, so a prompt-injected agent or malicious install script can steal static keys from memory. The product includes:
- Warm snapshots: Each CI run starts from a snapshot with dependencies installed. Snapshots rebuild when the lockfile changes, so setup cost is paid once in the background.
- MicroVM isolation: Each workflow step runs in its own hardware-isolated microVM built from zero-CVE Chainguard OS Packages, including FIPS-compliant toolchains.
- Short-lived credentials: A host-side proxy adds short-lived credentials to outbound requests in flight. Tools that need a credential on disk receive an encrypted, short-lived stand-in.
- Egress controls: Declarative policies block connections to unapproved endpoints. They can automatically deny requests or destroy the microVM to prevent data exfiltration.
- Signed attestations: Each run ties together the environment, test result and commit.
Cuscal joins as early design partner for payments infrastructure
Australian payments provider Cuscal is an early design partner. Brad McCoy, Senior Manager, Cloud Platforms at Cuscal, said agents are exposing flaws in traditional CI, including security models that give runners ambient access to secrets, cold setups and delayed post-commit validation.
Chainguard CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc said the company's own engineers work alongside thousands of AI agents. He called traditional CI the slowest and least secure part of its build process.
RedMonk analyst James Governor said existing CI platforms are struggling under the load from agentic development, leading to downtime, lost developer productivity and unshipped code. He said Chainguard Checks is designed to enable shift-left security while preventing CI from becoming a bottleneck.