A practical comparison of tools that protect source code and sensitive data from leaking to AI assistants — across deployment model, target user, and lifecycle coverage.
The problem
When developers use AI coding assistants — Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Cody, Aider — they implicitly send source code, comments, and configuration values to a remote server they do not control. For most companies that is a regulatory, contractual, or competitive risk: customer data inside test fixtures, IP inside class names, credentials inside config files, business logic spelled out in comments.
A growing market of products tries to address some part of this. They are not all the same product. Several are not even in the same category. This article maps 13 of them across three axes that actually matter at decision time:
Deployment model. Does the data leave your network, and to whom?
