Glossary

Guardrails

Glossary

What is guardrails?

LLM guardrails are runtime controls that detect or block unsafe prompts and responses—such as prompt injection, sensitive topics, and topic restriction—before they reach users or tools.

Guardrails sit in the governance layer of the harness. They fail closed for safety-critical paths and should be traced so you can see when and why a request was blocked.

OpenLIT includes open-source guardrails for prompt injection and related checks, correlated with OpenTelemetry traces so blocked calls show up next to the agent step that triggered them.

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