# Guardrails

> Guardrails are runtime checks placed around an AI system to constrain inputs, outputs, and tool calls within safety, compliance, and business policy.

Category: Production
Source: https://impetora.com/glossary/guardrails
Part of: Impetora AI consulting glossary (https://impetora.com/glossary)

## What is Guardrails?

Guardrails sit before and after the model. Pre-checks include prompt injection detection, PII redaction, topic allow-lists, and rate limits. Post-checks include schema validation, profanity and toxicity classifiers, citation verification, fact-grounding checks, and tool-call allow-lists. Guardrails can be implemented as classifiers, regex rules, validation libraries, or LLM-based judges. They are most effective when combined.

## How does Guardrails apply to enterprise AI?

Enterprise AI without guardrails is uninsurable. The EU AI Act, GDPR, and sectoral rules effectively require pre-deployment risk controls, including filters on personal data leaving the organisation.

## Related terms

- [Hallucination](https://impetora.com/glossary/hallucination) - A hallucination is a confident-sounding output from a generative AI model that is not grounded in any source and is factually wrong.
- [AI Risk Management](https://impetora.com/glossary/ai-risk-management) - AI risk management is the discipline of identifying, assessing, mitigating, and monitoring the harms an AI system can cause across its lifecycle.
- [Transparency Notice](https://impetora.com/glossary/transparency-notice) - A transparency notice is a clear disclosure to users that they are interacting with an AI system, what it is doing with their data, and what its limits are.
- [AI Audit Trail](https://impetora.com/glossary/ai-audit-trail) - An AI audit trail is the persistent, tamper-evident record of every input, output, tool call, model version, and decision an AI system has made, sufficient to reconstruct any past interaction.

## External references

- [NIST AI RMF Generative AI Profile](https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework)

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