Agentic Guardrails

Guardrails-based Agentic Pipelines

Guardrails-based pipelines are a critical of any agentic or RAG solution, as they address a wide range of security risks, hallucinations, compliance violations, malicious prompts, and much more. These guardrails are implemented **layer by layer in large-scale AI systems** to ensure that **if a vulnerability passes through one layer, a second, stronger layer can stop it**. A typical guardrail layering pipeline includes components such as …

 *Agentic Guardrail Pipeline (Created by [Fareed Khan](https://medium.com/u/b856005e5ecd?source=post_page---user_mention--a8f73de24ea7---------------------------------------))*

• Build an Unguarded Agent: First, we build a completely unguarded agent to observe its failures, like hallucinations and security vulnerabilities, firsthand on company data.
• Implement a Layered Defense: With the vulnerabilities identified, we then implement a defense-in-depth strategy, building our guardrails in a series of independent layers.
• Secure the Input (Layer 1): The first layer acts as our perimeter, using fast checks to filter malicious or irrelevant user prompts before they reach the agent.
• Scrutinize the Plan (Layer 2): The second layer moves inside the agent’s reasoning, validating its action plan to block risky or non-compliant intentions before execution.
• Verify the Output (Layer 3): The final layer serves as the last checkpoint, sanitizing the agent’s response for accuracy and compliance before it’s sent to the user.
• Evaluate the Full System: Finally, we run a holistic evaluation to measure the effectiveness of our layered defense and confirm the original vulnerabilities are fixed.

In this blog …

First, we will code and build the entire pipeline layer by layer, then try to bypass each layer to see how effective our guardrail pipeline is and where we ca