F5 AI Guardrails vs Giskard

F5 AI Guardrails is F5's runtime security product for AI models, applications and agents. F5 sells it alongside F5 AI Red Team, its automated adversarial testing product, and presents the two as a pair: findings from Red Team can be turned into guardrail policies. Both come from CalypsoAI, the AI security company F5 announced it would acquire on September 11, 2025 for $180 million in purchase consideration, mostly cash. The deal closed on September 26, 2025. F5 introduced both products when it announced the deal had closed, and made them generally available in January 2026 as part of its Application Delivery and Security Platform. F5, Inc. was incorporated in 1996 and is based in Seattle; this profile lists the company's founding year and headquarters, as the directory does for other big-company products. F5 AI Guardrails blocks prompt injection and jailbreaks, detects and prevents leakage of personal data and custom data categories, filters toxic or harmful output, and audits or blocks unauthorized tool calls and actions by agents. Policies can be written in natural language. Every enforcement action is logged with attribution, and logs can be exported to third-party SIEMs. It works with any model and runs in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, in private clouds, or on premises, including fully air-gapped environments. F5 AI Red Team sends a swarm of attacker agents to run static, prompt-based and multi-turn attacks, including indirect prompt injection and data-leakage tests on RAG applications. F5 says its attack library grows by more than 10,000 patterns a month. Red Team runs in the major public clouds or on premises as a certified Red Hat OpenShift operator. A feature called F5 AI Remediate drafts guardrails from Red Team findings, and a person approves each one before it goes live. **Gateway and platform** On June 22, 2026 F5 launched the F5 AI Security Platform, which groups AI governance, AI discovery, testing with AI Red Team and runtime protection with AI Guardrails, plus an audit trail across AI interactions. At the same time it announced the acquisition of SurePath AI, which adds network-based discovery of AI use, including shadow AI. F5's AI Gateway now combines a model gateway, an MCP gateway (with an MCP server registry and per-tool allow and deny controls) and AI Guardrails under one control plane. **Compliance coverage** F5 says Guardrails has automated auditing templates for GDPR, HIPAA and the EU AI Act, out-of-the-box policy controls aligned to PCI, PHI and the EU AI Act's prohibited-risk categories, and audit-ready logs. It also says Red Team findings can support compliance programs aligned with the NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act, and it publishes an infographic aligning its products with the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. We found no article-by-article mapping to the EU AI Act. **Who it's for** Large enterprises, including regulated financial services and healthcare organizations, that need AI guardrails they can host themselves or run air-gapped. F5 says both products are deployed at Fortune 500 companies. It also suits F5 customers who want AI controls on the same platform as their application delivery and API security.

Giskard is a Paris-based company founded in 2021 by Alex Combessie, Jean-Marie John-Mathews and Andrei Avtomonov. Combessie and John-Mathews are now co-CEOs, and Giskard says its co-founders previously built AI systems at Dataiku and Thales. It sells software and services for testing and securing LLM agents. Its first funding round, €1.5 million led by Elaia with Bessemer Venture Partners, was announced in December 2022. Giskard says it also received a €3 million strategic investment through the European Commission's EIC Accelerator in 2023 and a €3 million Bpifrance grant in 2024 for LLM evaluation research with Mistral AI, Artefact, INA and BnF. CORDIS lists a €2.5 million EU contribution to its EIC project, which ran from September 2023 to August 2025. Giskard Hub is the paid platform. Continuous red teaming runs multi-turn attacks that adapt to the agent's answers, generated from the company's own documents and knowledge bases. It tests for hallucinations, stereotypes and discrimination, harmful content, disclosure of personal information and prompt injection. Testing is black-box: the agent only needs an API endpoint, and coverage is limited to text-to-text conversational agents. The Hub also schedules agent evaluations and manages test datasets, custom checks and human review, with alerts, SSO, role-based access and audit logs. It runs as SaaS, in a private cloud or on premises, with EU or US data processing. Giskard Guards, launched in April 2026, is a runtime guardrail layer that runs in the customer's infrastructure. It inspects prompts, responses, tool calls and multi-step reasoning, and its policies are written as code in OPA/Rego. Giskard also sells AI security audits that end in a go/no-go report, and it is offering a free trial of a new Agentic Red Teamer to a limited number of users. The open-source library is Apache 2.0 licensed. Version 3, a rewrite for multi-turn agent testing, became stable in August 2026. Version 2 is no longer actively maintained, and tabular models have no v3 equivalent. Giskard also publishes Phare, an LLM safety benchmark launched in February 2025 with Google DeepMind as research partner. Logos on its site include BNP Paribas, AXA, BPCE, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, Michelin, Decathlon, L'Oréal and Doctolib. **AI compliance coverage** Guards includes an EU AI Act policy pack for prohibited practices such as social scoring and real-time biometric identification, and Giskard says Guards covers OWASP LLM risks. It doesn't map its products to the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center, run on Bastion, lists GDPR and a SOC 2 Type 2 report and shows HIPAA as in progress. **Who it's for** Enterprises, especially in European banking and insurance, that run customer-facing LLM agents and want testing and runtime controls they can deploy on premises.