Guardrails are the technical controls that bound AI system behavior: input filters that catch malicious or off-policy requests, output checks for safety and acc
The technical controls that bound AI system behavior: input filters that catch malicious or off-policy requests, output checks for safety and accuracy, permission scopes on tools, spend and step budgets for agents, and approval gates on consequential actions.
No. The 2026 consensus is defense-in-depth: model-level safety training is necessary but insufficient, so applications layer guardrails around it. For agentic systems, guardrail architecture, not model choice, usually separates a safe deployment from an incident.