About
Who makes this
Northbeams Labs is the research imprint of Northbeams. Northbeams pays for it. The parent name is on every page here rather than tucked away somewhere a reader has to go looking for it.
What Northbeams sells
Northbeams sells software that shows a company which AI tools, agents and MCP servers are running on its computers, and lets it decide what those are allowed to do. It is a paid product for businesses. Companies license it per person, and buy it either from us directly or through a managed service provider.
That is the entire pitch on this site. Pricing, demos and product pages live on the company site: northbeams.com.
Who signs the work
Research and reports carry a date and a named author, Joe McCormack. Tools are handled differently. They ship under the Northbeams Labs name, in a Labs repository, because a tool needs a maintainer identity that outlasts one person.
What Labs holds itself to
These are the standing rules. If Labs breaks one, it has lost the only thing it was created for.
- Nothing is gated. There is no form, no email address and no account on any tool or any report.
- The tools capture nothing: no phone-home, no telemetry, no upload.
- Every number is checkable. A first-party figure says how it was collected and over how many machines. A figure that came from somebody else is cited to them.
- Northbeams is disclosed and never buried. Independence here means editorial independence. It does not mean pretending we are strangers.
- Research voice rather than sales voice, which rules out urgency, fear framing and any kind of product pitch.
- Limitations go out with the work, next to it rather than buried in it.
- Nothing goes out that would not survive a competitor checking it line by line.
- If Labs stops being maintained, it gets archived with a note saying so, rather than left to rot.
What this site does not do
- No newsletter, no notify-me and no gated download. To follow the work, use the Atom feed or watch the repository.
- No analytics and no cookies. The site makes no third-party requests of any kind and loads nothing from anywhere else, fonts included.
- No product links in the writing. The commercial surface is one line in the footer, plus this page.