AI Coding Policy Template

Four controls decide whether security will sign off: who has access, what the policy allows, how data moves and whether anyone measures adoption. Settle them before the pilot starts, because they apply whichever tool you pick.

The owner column matters as much as the controls. A control with no named owner goes unchecked until someone has to answer for it. If nobody owns identity, for example, nobody checks that people who leave lose access.

Security does not own all four. Identity is IT's system of record, and policy is engineering leadership's call about what the team may ship. Adoption belongs to whoever owns developer experience. Security owns the data-flow question and the audit path, and it will ask about both.

Data flow is the question that stalls approvals, so answer it before the review meeting. Write down what the tool can read, what it can change, what leaves your network and where any of it is retained. Most of the answers come from the vendor's documentation and your own configuration. Ask the vendor for anything the documentation leaves out, and note where each answer came from.

The stack below breaks a rollout into layers. Policy comes first because the other layers carry it out. Identity controls who gets access, workflow moves code from prompt to merge, and measurement shows whether the rollout is working.

Start narrow, and expand only when the pilot earns it.

1. 1Week 1: pick one team, one repo and three realistic tasks.
2. 2Week 2: write the workflow standard from the pilot.
3. 3Week 3: train champions and add policy guardrails.
4. 4Week 4: expand only after quality, cost and review load are visible.

Treat the four weeks as an order, not a deadline. The first two weeks mostly show you what your standard should say. A pilot too broad to watch closely can't teach you that, so it starts with one team and a few real tasks. Pick the team that will tell you when something breaks, even if another team would produce a better-looking result. Put policy and training in place before the rollout grows, because both are harder to add once people have formed their own habits.

Expansion is the step to slow down. After a good pilot, the pressure to widen access can arrive before the evidence does. Before you add teams, answer three questions with numbers: did review load go up or down, what does a developer cost per month, and did quality hold.

Record the same numbers before the pilot starts, so you have a baseline to compare against. Two more weeks of the same pilot cost less than a rollout you have to walk back, so run them if any answer is still a guess.

Cursor ships often, so advice about it can go out of date. The table summarizes Cursor's recent releases, so you can check this page against the current product. For each release's date and sources, see What's new in Cursor 2026.

Ask what happens when someone ignores it. Cursor divides agent safety into two kinds of control. Security controls are deterministic: they block an operation whatever the model suggests. Steering is non-deterministic: it makes good behavior more likely but doesn't guarantee it. A clause that rests on steering is a request, and the template should say so in the clause itself.

The wording matters most for secrets. A clause that says secrets are excluded through .cursorignore reads like a guarantee that secrets cannot reach a model. It is not one, and Cursor's docs say so: they call .cursorignore a convenience feature, not a security boundary. For paths that must never be read, Cursor points to file system permissions or encryption, and a hook can block the read. Use all three on anything you would have to disclose.

Before you circulate the draft, mark every clause as enforced or expected. That one word tells a reviewer which promises have a control behind them.

The one that promises a record of what the agent did. Cursor's audit log can't support it, because it covers security events and administrative actions and leaves out prompts, agent responses and generated code. A clause that says AI-assisted changes are logged and reviewable cannot be met from the audit log alone.

Cursor recommends hooks to fill that gap. You attach one to prompt submission and one to the agent's code writes, and each sends a record to your compliance endpoint. Cursor advises logging metadata rather than the full prompt or code.

So build the hook before you write the clause. Whoever builds the hook decides what it records, and that decides what the clause can truthfully claim. If the clause comes first, the policy makes a promise that the logging pipeline has to be bent to keep.

Check your plan before you write the clause, because audit logs are an Enterprise feature. On Enterprise, admins view them in the team dashboard, and Cursor can stream them to a SIEM, a webhook or S3. Without them, the escalation path has to be a named person rather than a query.

Start with models. Name the models the org allows, and say whether people may use their own API keys. On Enterprise, admins can turn models off and block personal keys in the team dashboard, so both clauses can be enforced. On other plans, mark them as expected.

Personal keys need their own clause. Cursor's Zero Data Retention policy does not apply to requests made with a personal key, and the provider's own privacy policy governs those requests instead. A policy that enforces Privacy ModeCursor's setting that guarantees code data is not used for training by Cursor or its model providers, and that an admin can enforce org-wide; data-retention terms are a separate, contractual layer. Press Enter for the full definition. across the org but says nothing about personal keys leaves those requests outside the guarantee it relies on.

A few models need data retention with their provider. For Enterprise customers and for teams with Privacy ModeCursor's setting that guarantees code data is not used for training by Cursor or its model providers, and that an admin can enforce org-wide; data-retention terms are a separate, contractual layer. Press Enter for the full definition. on, Cursor already requires admin approval before anyone uses one. So for those teams the approval step already exists, and the policy's job is to say who grants it and on what basis.

A repository blocklist covers the other direction: repos Cursor should not touch. On Enterprise, Cursor refuses to index or work with a blocked repo in the editor and the CLI. The blocklist does not apply to Cloud AgentsAgents that run in a Cursor-managed virtual machine, check out the repo, do the work and open a pull request, then shut down, with no load on your laptop. Press Enter for the full definition., Automations or BugbotCursor's automated PR reviewer that posts inline findings and can push fix commits from isolated VMs. Press Enter for the full definition., so the clause has to cover those surfaces separately.