# Zuplo AI Guardrails

The Zuplo AI Gateway supports guardrails to protect your AI-powered applications
from security threats, ensure compliance, and maintain quality in both requests
and responses flowing through the gateway.

## Available Guardrail Policies

### Akamai AI Firewall

The [Akamai AI Firewall](./policies/akamai-ai-firewall.mdx) provides
enterprise-grade security for AI applications, including:

- **Prompt injection defense** - Protects against attackers manipulating AI
  models through deceptive inputs
- **Data loss prevention (DLP)** - Detects and blocks sensitive data leaks in
  AI-generated responses and incoming requests
- **Toxic content filtering** - Flags hate speech, misinformation, and offensive
  content
- **Adversarial AI security** - Protects against remote code execution, model
  back doors, and data poisoning attacks

## Observability & Tracing

Guardrails work alongside observability policies to provide visibility into AI
interactions:

- [Comet Opik Tracing](./policies/comet-opik-tracing.mdx) - Trace and monitor AI
  interactions with Comet's Opik platform
- [Galileo Tracing](./policies/galileo-tracing.mdx) - Monitor AI quality and
  performance with Galileo

## How Guardrails Work

Guardrails are applied as policies on your AI Gateway routes. They inspect both
inbound requests (prompts sent to LLM providers) and outbound responses (content
returned from LLM providers) in real-time.

When a guardrail detects a policy violation:

1. The request or response is blocked before reaching its destination
2. An appropriate error response is returned to the caller
3. The violation is logged for audit and monitoring purposes

## Getting Started

To add guardrails to your AI Gateway:

1. Open your [project](https://portal.zuplo.com/+/account/project/) associated
   with your AI Gateway in the Zuplo Portal
2. Open the **Code** tab and select your `routes.oas.json` file
3. Select the route for your AI Gateway endpoint
4. Click **Add Policy** and search for the guardrail you want to add
5. Configure the policy settings and click **OK**
6. Save your changes to deploy

## Custom Guardrails

You can build custom guardrails using Zuplo's programmable gateway. Create a
custom inbound or outbound policy that inspects request/response content and
applies your own rules. This allows you to implement organization-specific
content policies, regulatory compliance checks, or domain-specific validation.