Galileo vs Giskard

Galileo is an evaluation, observability and guardrails platform for generative AI applications and AI agents. It has been owned by Cisco since May 2026: Cisco announced its intent to acquire Galileo Technologies, Inc. on April 9, 2026, and said on May 22, 2026 that the acquisition was complete. Terms weren't disclosed. Galileo is now part of Splunk, a Cisco company, and its documentation says that as of August 7, 2026 "Galileo is now Splunk Agent Observability." Customers who onboarded before that date use Galileo's documentation; later customers use Splunk's. galileo.ai's pricing page now redirects to Splunk's pricing page. Galileo was founded in 2021 by Vikram Chatterji (CEO), formerly of Google AI, Atindriyo Sanyal, formerly of Apple and Uber AI, and Yash Sheth, formerly of Google, and was based in San Francisco. Before the acquisition it raised $68 million, most recently a $45 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners in October 2024; it then said six Fortune 50 companies, including Comcast and Twilio, were customers. The platform logs traces and spans from agent frameworks (LangChain and LangGraph, CrewAI, the OpenAI Agents SDK, Strands Agents, the Vercel AI SDK, and any OpenTelemetry or OpenInference source) and scores them with metrics such as context adherence, correctness, tool selection quality, action completion, toxicity, PII, prompt injection and sexism/bias. Many metrics run on Luna-2, Galileo's small evaluation models, which require an enterprise plan; Galileo says they cut production monitoring costs by up to 97% with latency under 200 ms. Signals (January 2026) detects failure patterns across production traces and can turn them into custom metrics. Agent Control, an open-source (Apache 2.0) control plane released in March 2026, applies central policies to agents (deny, steer, warn, log or allow) using Luna, NVIDIA NeMo, Amazon Bedrock or custom evaluators. It replaced Galileo's older Protect guardrails, which were deprecated in June 2026. Under Splunk, Galileo's technology is being added to the AI Agent Monitoring feature of Splunk Observability. In June 2026 Splunk described Splunk Agent Observability as a new on-premises offering powered by Galileo; in October 2026 it said the product had started rolling out in September 2026 on premises, in Cisco Cloud Control and in Splunk Observability Cloud, and its pricing page lists it for Observability Cloud and self-hosted deployments. **AI compliance coverage** Galileo doesn't document support for the EU AI Act, the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust page says it has a SOC 2 Type II report, provides HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and can sign business associate agreements (BAAs). What it offers a compliance program is evidence of how models and agents behave (evaluation scores, traces and guardrail decisions), not framework controls or an AI inventory. **Who it's for** Engineering teams building LLM applications and agents that want evaluation, production monitoring and runtime guardrails in one tool. New customers now buy through Splunk, so it fits Splunk Observability customers most naturally.

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.