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.

As enterprises scale their AI systems, safety and reliability are no longer optional.
From content moderation and compliance to hallucination detection and PII protection, teams need multiple layers of guardrails to deploy AI responsibly in production.

Portkey’s guardrails ecosystem allows teams to choose the right providers for their use cases and apply checks dynamically across models, routes, and environments.

Porkety is expanding this ecosystem with Qualifire, a provider of comprehensive AI safety and quality checks that help keep AI applications compliant, accurate, and secure.

Integrating with Portkey's AI gateway

Integrating Qualifire into the Portkey AI Gateway makes it easier for teams to operationalize safety and quality guardrails at scale. Qualifire defines the checks. Portkey ensures they run consistently across every model, environment, and request.

1. Unified guardrails across all models

Apply Qualifire guardrails to any LLM, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Claude, or custom deployments, through Portkey’s unified guardrails interface.
Checks can be configured globally, per route, or for specific teams.

2. Real-time monitoring and visibility

All Qualifire results flow directly into Portkey’s observability layer. Teams can view which requests triggered violations, track patterns over time, and export logs for audit or compliance workflows.

3. Dynamic enforcement

Decide how guardrails respond to violations. You can block, flag, or sanitize responses, or apply only certain categories like security or safety depending on the use case.

4. Composable with reliability strategies

Qualifire checks can work alongside Portkey’s routing, retry, and fallback features.
When a response fails a guardrail, Portkey can automatically retry the request, switch to a different provider, or fetch a cached safe response.

5. Centralized governance

Administrators can apply Qualifire guardrails across the organization through Portkey’s governance controls. All enforcement policies, budgets, and access rules remain centralized, ensuring consistent safety standards across teams.

This Partnership Enables

Qualifire guardrails run natively through the Portkey 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.

Strengthening the guardrails ecosystem

The addition of Qualifire builds on Portkey’s vision of an open, extensible guardrails ecosystem.
Teams can now choose from multiple providers within the Gateway, combining safety, compliance, and reliability checks that fit their specific requirements.

This flexibility allows organizations to adopt a layered approach to AI safety — one that scales across models, use cases, and teams while remaining centrally governed through the Portkey platform.

Qualifire guardrails are now available to Portkey users. You can enable them directly in your workspace.

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