16 governance tools for securing your AI fleet

Every DevOps team member knows that dealing with an AI is like being a circus lion tamer. The boss and the audience are happy when the lions sit on the pedestal and roar on cue, but there’s always the danger that they’ll go rogue and bring the whole show to a quick and disastrous end.

The reality is that running LLMs in production means being ready to handle hallucinations, data leakage, misinformation, madness, or worse. Lately, a range of companies have emerged to offer tools, platforms, and systems aimed at helping AIOps teams shoulder the load of keeping AIs in check. They’re building algorithms that are an amalgamation of psychiatrist, police officer, social worker, politruk, and office snitch. Yes, some have their own LLMs buried inside, an irony not lost on anyone, but at least they’re trying.

These tools often have words like “guardrails,” “governance,” or “trust” in their name. They’re closely related to other AIOps tools that focus on development or benchmarking. These emerging product categories often overlap and that overlap will only grow as AI — and the market surrounding the technology — continues to evolve.

Here in alphabetical order are 16 of the most interesting companies working on controlling the wonderful and dangerous LLMs that promise to do so much — as long as they can be kept on that pedestal and behaving.

Collibra

Data products require controlling access enough to stop leaks while providing just the right data that the clients need. Collibra offers an AI Command Center that merges tools for governance and privacy protection with general agent management jobs such as minimizing the number of hallucinations. This Unified Control Plane catalogs the various agents and begins by giving each a “trust score” that measures its riskiness and its readiness. The tool integrates well with other data management tools such as Snowflake or Databricks so that managers can control access by drilling down into full audit trails.

Pricing: No standard pricing information is available. Schedule a demonstration and meet with the sales team.

Standout feature: A focus on securing data across the entire enterprise means that AI governance is just part of a larger strategic goal on accuracy.

Best suited for: Large enterprises that need consistent data quality.

Confident Security

Testing and tracking AI compliance often requires dealing with lots of private or sensitive information and that’s why Confident Security developed a tool for offering privacy to cloud computing called OpenPCC, a name that nods to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Teams can choose between the open-source core or the commercial product with a full-fledged SaaS platform and API. Both use layers of encryption to ensure AI inference is computed inside a secure and, if needed, anonymous system and released only when it passes a set of tests. The extra layers of privacy-enforcing math help for applications with more sensitive queries.

Pricing: Usage-based pricing metered by tokens.

Standout feature: Predefined compliance wrappers for specific industries allows them to say, “We take financial responsibility for any breach or misuse.”

Best suited for: Compliance-constrained industries such as healthcare or financial services.

Credo AI

Tracking agents and watching them for risky behavior is what Credo AI was built to do. Enterprise DevOps teams can build a centralized catalog of agents or LLMs and then refer to this “Govern AI Assistant” (GAIA) regularly to keep compliance issues under control. The tool works at all levels from the lowest model level through the agent level, application level, and network level, controlling data flows when necessary. Credo’s system offers “policy packs” for regulatory frameworks from around the world, including the EU AI Act, SOC2, ISO-42001, and the GDPR. Automated guardrails can either track compliance or actively enforce policies.

Pricing: Meet with the sales team for a quote.

Standout feature: Risk assessment aimed at international regulatory frameworks.

Best suited for: Large, multi-country enterprises.

F5 with CalypsoAI

Standout feature: Real-time tools and integrated automated red teaming watch for problems sicj as prompt abuse.

Best suited for: High-volume applications such as publicly facing web applications.

Fiddler AI

“All enterprise agents need the AI control plane,” announces the sales literature from Fiddler AI. Its product tracks the behavior of a model and attempts to offer a solid set of explanations for what it does. This knowledge can become the basis for governing and securing the model, as well as assuring its compliance with various rules and regulations. Fiddler works at enterprise scale to aggregate unlimited copies of more than 100-plus metrics to track hallucinations, toxicity, personally identifiable information (PII) leakage, and drift. Then it enforces policies to protect against violations such as jailbreaks, prompt injections, or bias. The goal is to handle the immense scale of telemetry necessary for keeping large deployments of models focused on delivering what the enterprise needs.

Pricing: Free tier for developers; metered usage based on counting traces.

Standout feature: Unified platform integrates guardrails with general model maintenance.

Best suited for: Teams running stacks full of predictive ML models.

Guardrails AI  

Guardrails AI offers two main products: Snowglobe, a simulator that feeds endless streams of synthetic data to your model and looks for anomalies; and Guardrails OSS, a production-ready framework that watches over your LLM and fixes issues in the output. Guardrails OSS enforces various rules or “validators” that address a wide range of issues, including blocking bad responses (PII leakage, jailbreaking) and fixing minor issues such as misformatted JSON. It’s designed to wrap around any LLM and provide a set of, well, guardrails around all interactions.

Pricing: Open-source tools can also be managed.

Standout feature: Real-time surveillance of model behavior for securing outward-facing tools.

Best suited for: Structured applications that need LLM responses to conform to set formats.

Hidden Layer

Finding the deepest weaknesses can be difficult with any computer system, but the challenge is even greater with the inscrutable nature of LLMs. Hidden Layer’s platform offers a comprehensive defense that begins with a cataloging approach intent on finding even the most difficult to locate AIs deep in the stack. From there, it deploys attack simulators and automated red teams to continue to probe the models it identifies. Its AI Bill of Materials (AI BoM) digs into the models themselves, searching through the weights and metadata for weaknesses. The multilayered approach aims to ensure all the models across the enterprise stack are behaving correctly and not leaking crucial information.

Pricing: Available from cloud marketplaces such as AWS, with custom pricing for installations.

Standout feature: AI Attack Simulation enables developers to anticipate potential problems.

Best suited for: Cyberteams securing proprietary models.

IBM’s watsonx.governance

Controlling a constellation of agents and models with IBM’s watsonx.governance begins with building a governance graph that tracks the risk associated with all deployed models. The system tracks development and deployment so that stakeholders can get fast answers on what data went into training and what answers were coming out of the model. DevOps teams can track standard metrics that arrive out-of-the-box, such as model drift or hallucination percentages, or they can define their own. The approach often builds off synergies with other IBM products running in the IBM Cloud.

Pricing: After a free 30-day trial, costs are metered according to usage and deployment breadth.

Standout feature: Full lifecycle integration aimed at covering all governance issues across large clouds.

Best suited for: Large enterprises with multicloud deployments in compliance-heavy environments.

Lakera

When end-users interact directly with the LLM by speaking or writing questions and prompts, Lakera is there to watch over the traffic and keep the agents in line. The tool is designed to stop the kind of jailbreaking and prompt injection games that allow end-users to attack systems. Granular access controls enable fine-grained orchestration of the interactions to prevent unauthorized data leakage or other attacks. The company also sponsors “Gandalf,” a well-known educational game that teaches AI security, and many feel that their tools are better because of the knowledge gained from developing and running it.

Pricing: Free community tier for Lakera Guard with limited requests and tokens. Larger limits come from a meeting with the sales team.

Standout feature: High-speed tool optimized for low-latency protection

Best suited for: Teams delivering answers in real-time environments.

Lasso Security

Taking control of AI across a large enterprise platform requires a breadth of knowledge and the tools to control it. Lasso Security begins with a comprehensive census of AI implementations driven by automated tools that can find the various LLMs through techniques such as scanning source code repositories and continuous integration pipelines. This inventory becomes the foundation for red teaming and runtime enforcement.

Pricing: Custom pricing for each deployment.

Standout feature: Agentic tools aimed at multi-step workflows.

Best suited for: Teams securing relatively open environments that encourage experimentation.

LogicGate

CISOs in need of a no-code approach to governance, risk, and compliance can turn to the Risk Cloud from LogicGate. The tool fills a graph database with information and an assessment of all the services in the enterprise. One aspect tracks potential problems exacerbated by LLMs. Its tool reaches out through prebuilt connections to create what the company calls a “Risk Cloud Quantify,” a value that estimates the potential danger using a mixture of data collection and Monte Carlo simulations. LogicGate also tackles more general problems of management such as evaluating business tradeoffs with its Value Realization Tool. Together, this gives leadership the centralized reporting system for making data-informed decisions.

Pricing: Pricing available after a demonstration.

Standout feature: Deep integration with governance models for traditional stacks.

Best suited for: Full-stack implementations that need governance control over AI and traditional code.

Mindgard

The AI attack surface is broad, varied, and largely unknown. Mindgard’s platform is designed to be an “automated red team,” a set of programs and AIs that constantly poke and try to disrupt the target. Through a constant cycle of discovery, recon, attacking, and defense re-evaluation, the system searches for risks and proposes guardrail improvements to eliminate them. Designed to work with the major LLMs and agents, the system can be deployed quickly to deliver a fast security assessment and — often — a set of new holes to plug.

Pricing: Sandboxed free tier and interactive pricing for larger workflows.

Standout feature: Automated red-teaming simulator deploys hundreds of potential threats for testing.

Best suited for: Security researchers maintaining a high tempo of vigilance.

OneTrust

Managing personal information and other legal restrictions are increasingly important for anyone developing an AI solution. Once you start mixing private data into the training corpus, the DevOps team needs a plan. OneTrust offers what the company calls “Continuous Governance,” which largely means a platform that mixes cataloging, monitoring, and filtering for an entire enterprise stack. AI is just part of a larger system that also manages databases and other compliance challenges. The goal is to offer the right legal filters so that AI developers can get back to wrestling with prompts and context windows.

Pricing: Pricing available by request.

Standout feature: Global privacy compliance database aimed at tracking worldwide compliance issues.

Best suited for: Large, regulated multinational companies.

Prompt Security

When the right solution is to put one gatekeeper for access to an LLM, Prompt Security offers a proxy gateway that will filter the data flowing in and out, watching for any kind of malfeasance. The approach is said to be “LLM agnostic,” which means that it focuses on scrutinizing the input and output, not the internal state of the agents. Prompt Security promises deep content inspection of these data flows, something essential for detecting leaks of PII or other protected information. This architecture also makes it easier to integrate the tool with a variety of AI-driven applications, both internal and external.

Pricing: Open-source tools for developers; full support for deployment available from the sales team.

Standout feature: AI Security Academy for building a depth of knowledge.

Best suited for: Teams able to leverage the power of open source.

Protect AI

Sometimes dangers lurk deep inside a stack, often in hidden locations. The collection of tools from Protect AI examines the whole pipeline for flaws, weaknesses, or hidden problems. The most outward-facing tool, Guardian, is a collection of scanners that use a configurable set of rules to dig deep into the data flows as part of your CI/CD pipeline. Its partner, Recon, offers an automated red team with a predefined collection of attacks to be tested immediately. A third part, Layer, integrates AI security with general cybersecurity tools to build a comprehensive defense. Finally, two open-source project — LLM Security and ModelScan — offer localized, model-agnostic answers.

Pricing: Custom pricing based on the number of models, pipelines, and agents

Standout feature: End-to-end integration for protecting the entire data pipeline.

Best suited for: Teams defending complex pipelines and workflows.

Securiti.ai

One of the top goals for anyone working with AI is to make sure that the same rules of sharing data from, say, a database also apply to all the LLMs running on the same platforms. Security.ai calls this process data security posture management (DSPM). Its centralized platform searches out, identifies, and tracks all the agents running inside the enterprise and then controls their behavior with tools such as Context-Sensitive Firewalls, Data Minimization, and Data Flow Governance. Several dozen tools work together in a constellation that harmonizes governance with privacy awareness and data management.

Pricing: Custom pricing based on volume.

Standout feature: Data command Center for linking all security issues.

Best suited for: Enterprises with complex workflows with custom data governance issues.