Expanding AI safety with Qualifire guardrails on Portkey

We're excited to announce that Qualifire is partnering with Portkey to bring production-ready guardrails to the Portkey LLM Gateway. This partnership combines Portkey's robust infrastructure for managing LLM applications with Qualifire's specialized evaluations and guardrails technology, giving enterprises the control and safety they need when deploying AI at scale.

This Partnership Enables

Qualifire guardrails run natively through the Portkey AI gateway, protecting critical security and quality checkpoints that enterprises need:

• Prompt Injection: Detect and prevent malicious prompt injections and jailbreaking attempts 
• PII Detection: Identify and protect sensitive personal information
• Context Grounding: Ensure responses stay anchored to provided context
• Hallucination Detection: flag and prevent unsupported or fabricated outputs
• Content Safety: Filter inappropriate or harmful content
• Tool Use Quality: Validate MCP tools and function calls, prevent excessive or unsafe agency.
• Policy Enforcement: Apply custom governance assertions to enforce anything from product requirements to organizational policy.

What makes Qualifire's approach unique is our use of SLM Judges (Small Language Model Judges) - specialized models tuned for evaluation. 

This brings state of the art performance while maintaining unmatched low latency, making guardrails practical for production environments without slowing user experiences or increasing costs.

Why It Matters

As LLM applications move from experimentation to production, the gap between "it works in the demo" and "it's safe for our customers" has become increasingly apparent. Enterprises face real risks: leaked PII can result in regulatory violations, hallucinations can damage customer trust, and prompt injections can compromise system integrity.

Traditional approaches to these problems are inadequate. Running full-scale LLMs for evaluation is slow and expensive. Rule-based systems are brittle and manual review doesn't scale.

This partnership addresses these challenges by providing:

• Comprehensive coverage: one place to address the most critical risks in production
• Performance at scale: fast and cost efficient to run on every request
• Unified integration: A single integration point into Portkey that works across all LLM providers
• Operational visibility: Clear insights into where your applications are being protected and why requests are being flagged

Enterprises using Portkey can add Qualifire guardrails which means they can deploy with confidence, knowing that robust protections are in place without sacrificing performance or user experience.

Looking Ahead

This partnership is just the beginning. As LLM applications continue to evolve and new risks emerge, we're committed to expanding our guardrail capabilities and deepening the integration between our platforms.

We're working together to make the most reliable AI systems in the world and ensure that enterprises have everything they need to deploy AI safely and effectively.

If you build LLM applications with Portkey and  need enterprise-grade guardrails, get started with Qualifire today.

About Qualifire: Qualifire provides purpose-built evaluations and guardrails for LLM applications, powered by Small Language Model Judges that deliver production-grade safety and quality checks at enterprise scale.