Confidential Agents vs Confidential Agents for RAG: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Confidential Agents

Enterprise security and AI teams deploying agents on regulated datasets will see immediate value in Confidential Agents' hardware-level encryption during inference, which eliminates the typical choice between data utility and privacy. The platform covers NIST PR.DS and PR.AA controls with cryptographic verification built in, meaning you get attestable proof of data isolation rather than policy assertions. Skip this if your use case is consumer-scale or doesn't involve cross-organizational data sharing; the operational overhead and pricing model assume you're solving a specific high-stakes problem, not running commodity AI workloads.

Confidential Agents for RAG

Enterprise security teams deploying RAG and AI agents with sensitive customer or proprietary data will find Confidential Agents for RAG essential because hardware-enforced confidential computing eliminates the attack surface that application-layer encryption leaves open. The platform covers all three NIST data and platform security controls, meaning data stays encrypted in use, not just in transit and at rest. This is overkill for teams running non-sensitive workloads or those still experimenting with RAG in dev environments; the operational complexity and cost justify themselves only when data classification actually demands it.