Agents
Guardrails
Guardrails are the checks that keep an LLM or agent inside acceptable bounds in production.
They include content filters, schema validation, permission scoping, and human-approval gates.
They matter most for agents with real tool access, where a bad response becomes an unwanted action.
Guardrails are a design layer added deliberately, not a property models come with by default.
← Back to the full glossaryRelated terms
Agent (Agentic AI) An agent is an LLM given a loop, memory, and tools it can call. Human Oversight Human oversight is a checkpoint where a person can meaningfully approve, reject, or intervene. Prompt Injection Prompt injection is untrusted input crafted to override a model's system prompt or task. Red Teaming Red teaming is deliberately attacking your own AI system to find what breaks first.
More in Agents
Tool Calling Tool calling lets a model request a structured action instead of only generating text. Model Context Protocol (MCP) MCP is an open standard for connecting LLM applications to tools and data sources. Context Engineering Context engineering decides what occupies a model's context window at every step, and in what order. Tool Contract A tool contract is the schema a tool exposes to a model.