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Guardrails

Guardrails help you deploy AI applications safely by intercepting and evaluating both user prompts and model responses for harmful content. Acting as a proxy between your application and model providers (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and others), AI Gateway's Guardrails ensure a consistent and secure experience across your entire AI ecosystem.

Guardrails proactively monitor interactions between users and AI models, giving you:

  • Consistent moderation: Uniform moderation layer that works across models and providers.
  • Enhanced safety and user trust: Proactively protect users from harmful or inappropriate interactions.
  • Flexibility and control over allowed content: Specify which categories to monitor and choose between flagging or outright blocking.
  • Auditing and compliance capabilities: Receive updates on evolving regulatory requirements with logs of user prompts, model responses, and enforced guardrails.

How Guardrails work

AI Gateway inspects all interactions in real time by evaluating content against predefined safety parameters. Guardrails work by:

  1. Intercepting interactions: AI Gateway proxies requests and responses, sitting between the user and the AI model.

  2. Inspecting content:

    • User prompts: AI Gateway checks prompts against safety parameters (for example, violence, hate, or sexual content). Based on your settings, prompts can be flagged or blocked before reaching the model.
    • Model responses: Once processed, the AI model response is inspected. If hazardous content is detected, it can be flagged or blocked before being delivered to the user.

  3. Applying actions: Depending on your configuration, flagged content is logged for review, while blocked content is prevented from proceeding.