F5 AI Guardrails
Define and deploy agile data security, threat management, and governance for AI models, apps, and agents.
Secure AI systems and connected data—from pilot to production
Threat actors discover new ways to attack, models find new paths to harmful outputs, and users find new ways to break policy. F5 AI Guardrails secures AI models and agents against malicious threats, data leakage, and harmful outputs with industry leading efficacy and unmatched deployment flexibility.
Benefits
Combat adversarial attacks
Safeguard AI systems from evolving threats like prompt injection and jailbreaks
- Prompt Injection Defense: Protect against prompt injection attacks, data exfiltration, and jailbreak attacks without excessive false positives
- Threat-Informed Protection: Backed by the preeminent AI threat library with over 10,000 attack patterns added monthly, F5 Labs Threat Research ensures threat protection outpaces emerging attack techniques
- CASI Model Risk Leaderboard: Inform model selection with detailed testing into the risk profiles unique to the most prominent models
Secure AI data
Detect and prevent data leakage, compliance failures, and policy violations at runtime
- Model-agnostic policy enforcement: Secure the millions of public and proprietary models with consistent policy enforcement and privacy
- Custom policy creation: Rapidly create bespoke, policy-driven security controls tailored by use case, region, and industry through an intuitive natural language interface
- Day 1 Compliance Controls: Expert-built guardrails for PII leakage, EU AI Act alignment, PCI, and PHI protection
Govern responsible AI usage
Obstruct harmful outputs, and enforce restrictions on model and agent privileges
- F5 AI Guardrails helps teams adapt security as requirements change
- Secure AI Agents: Prevent excessive agency and privilege escalation by enforcing guardrails on agent actions and tool use
- Content Moderation: Align AI outputs to enterprise-specific definitions of biased, toxic, or harmful content
Simplify AI observability
Maintain continuous visibility and traceability across all models, users, and agent interactions
- Audit-ready logging: Explain and trace every enforcement action with detailed analysis and guardrail attribution
- Agent Visibility: Observe and log system prompts, instructions, model reasoning, and tool calls for single- or multi-agent systems.
- Performance Dashboard: Continuously monitor performance metrics, usage trends, and recent enforcement actions in a unified dashboard or exported to a third-party SIEM
Core capabilities
F5 AI Guardrails mitigates risks like data leakage, harmful outputs, and adversarial attacks with comprehensive runtime security for deployed AI models and agents.
Custom guardrail creation
Create bespoke controls in seconds through natural language
Threat-informed protection
Defend against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks with expert-built guardrails
Content moderation
Avoid harmful outputs with safeguards for toxic, biased, or inaccurate content
Private AI
Maintain consistent privacy with full functionality in on-prem and fully air-gapped deployments
Audit-ready traceability
Explain and trace every interaction and why it was blocked or allowed
Simplified compliance
Ensure enterprise-wide policy alignment with automated auditing templates for GDPR, HIPAA, EUAIA, and more.
Semantic data security
Prevent sensitive data leakage of standard and custom categories during AI interactions
Secure agentic AI
Audit and block unauthorized tool calls and agent actions
Deployment methods
Model-agnostic
Guardrails delivers consistent policy enforcement for every public and private AI model
Public cloud
Deploy guardrails in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
Private cloud
Confine all data, inspection, and enforcement actions to private compute boundaries
On-prem
Maintain full functionality in on-prem or fully air-gapped environments
Supported agents
Apply the same guardrails to any OpenAI, Anthropic, or similarly formatted AI agent
Technology alliances
Stronger AI security with the partners you trust
F5 integrates with leading security and AI vendors to extend protection across the full lifecycle. Joint solutions secure data, models, and the APIs between them, keeping your AI fast, governed, and under your control.
Resources
Demos
Blogs
Insights and reports
CASI LEADERBOARD
INFOGRAPHIC
WHITE PAPER
Webinars
FAQs
AI guardrails are frameworks of policies, technologies, and controls designed to ensure that AI systems operate securely and responsibly within defined boundaries. In the enterprise context, this includes mitigating risks such as adversarial attacks, data leakage, and compliance failures. The requirement for AI guardrails must go beyond merely preventing undesired behavior to proactively flagging risks, protecting sensitive data, and enabling trust across complex, multi-model systems.
F5 AI Guardrails applies content moderation filters and custom policy controls at runtime to inspect model outputs before they reach users. You can deploy out-of-the-box safeguards or create custom guardrails using natural language to detect and block toxic, biased, or harmful content. If a particular hallucination category has been observed at high frequency, F5 AI Guardrails lets you define rules that constrain model responses to avoid high-risk topics and prevent outputs that deviate from acceptable parameters.
F5 AI Guardrails includes out-of-the-box policy controls aligned to PCI, PHI, and EU AI Act prohibited-risk categories. It secures multiple sensitive data patterns at runtime and logs every enforcement action with transparent reasoning. These audit-ready logs simplify reporting for compliance teams and support enterprise governance requirements.
Model provider guardrails are typically a baseline protection designed to meet the provider’s compliance obligations and risk appetite rather than protections extensible to all enterprise use cases, and risk definitions. In recent SecureIQLab testing of foundational models’ built-in guardrails against sophisticated AI attacks, roughly 13% of attacks were successfully blocked. Model providers may offer limited security controls but the efficacy of those controls does not meet the standards of most enterprise workloads and often restricts those controls to specific models rather than the full breadth of an organization’s AI inventory.
Open-source AI security tools offer a starting point but require significant internal expertise to configure, deploy, and maintain. They're community-driven, which often means slower updates, limited compliance-ready templates, and gaps in audit trails required for regulated industries. Commercial AI security tools provide enterprise-grade capabilities including dedicated threat research, regular updates against emerging attack techniques, and out-of-the-box compliance controls needed for enterprise AI workloads.