Why Pipelock Is an Egress Agent Firewall, Not an Inbound WAF

The question behind the word firewall

Security teams hear "firewall" and picture something inbound. A firewall, WAF, or IPS sits in front of a service. Traffic comes from the outside world toward the protected app. The control inspects requests before they reach the app and blocks malicious payloads at the door.

That is outside-in protection. It fits web applications, where many attacks have recognizable request shapes: SQL injection, cross-site scripting, known exploit signatures, or malformed protocol behavior. The web server is the thing being attacked, and the attacker sends requests into it.

AI agents invert that model. The agent is not only a server receiving input. It reads external content, calls tools, sends HTTP requests, invokes MCP servers, and runs with credentials. The dangerous event is rarely that a hostile packet reached the agent. The dangerous event is that the agent got talked into doing something with outbound effects.