---
title: Guardrails · Cloudflare AI Gateway docs
description: 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 (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and others), AI Gateway's Guardrails ensure a consistent and secure experience across your entire AI ecosystem.
lastUpdated: 2025-02-27T12:51:28.000Z
source_url:
  html: https://a74404c8.preview.developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/guardrails/index.md
  md: https://a74404c8.preview.developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/guardrails/
---

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://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/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/)
