---
description: Evaluate AI Gateway prompts and responses for harmful content and enforce safety policies across providers.
title: Guardrails
image: https://developers.cloudflare.com/og-docs.png
---

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# Guardrails

Last updated Aug 24, 2026|Copy as Markdown|[View as Markdown](https://docs-durable-objects-instance-replaced-errors.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/features/guardrails/index.md)|[Agent setup](https://docs-durable-objects-instance-replaced-errors.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/agent-setup/)

Guardrails help you deploy AI applications safely by intercepting and evaluating both user prompts and model responses for harmful content. Acting as a proxy between your application and [model providers](https://docs-durable-objects-instance-replaced-errors.previews.developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/usage/providers/) (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and others), AI Gateway's Guardrails ensure a consistent and secure experience across your entire AI ecosystem.

Guardrails proactively monitor interactions between users and AI models, giving you:

* **Consistent moderation**: Uniform moderation layer that works across models and providers.
* **Enhanced safety and user trust**: Proactively protect users from harmful or inappropriate interactions.
* **Flexibility and control over allowed content**: Specify which categories to monitor and choose between flagging or outright blocking.
* **Auditing and compliance capabilities**: Receive updates on evolving regulatory requirements with logs of user prompts, model responses, and enforced guardrails.

## Video demo

## How Guardrails work

AI Gateway inspects all interactions in real time by evaluating content against predefined safety parameters. Guardrails work by:

1. Intercepting interactions: AI Gateway proxies requests and responses, sitting between the user and the AI model.
2. Inspecting content:

  * User prompts: AI Gateway checks prompts against safety parameters (for example, violence, hate, or sexual content). Based on your settings, prompts can be flagged or blocked before reaching the model.
  * Model responses: Once processed, the AI model response is inspected. If hazardous content is detected, it can be flagged or blocked before being delivered to the user.
3. Applying actions: Depending on your configuration, flagged content is logged for review, while blocked content is prevented from proceeding.

## Related resource

* [Cloudflare Blog: Keep AI interactions secure and risk-free with Guardrails in AI Gateway ↗](https://blog.cloudflare.com/guardrails-in-ai-gateway/)

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