Guardrails for LLM Agents 2026: NeMo vs Llama Guard 4
LLM agent guardrails changed in 2026 once agents got tools. Compare NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails vs Llama Guard 4 for real tool-calling risk, latency, and cost.
Chapter 1: Why Agent Guardrails Broke in 2026 (And What Changed) For about three years, "AI safety engineering" in production meant one thing: a classifier sitting between a user and a chatbot, scoring text for toxicity, self-harm, and a handful of policy categories. It worked because the threat model was simple. A model that only emits text can only cause harm through text. The blast radius of a bad output was a screenshot on social media. That threat model is now obsolete, and most teams found out the hard way. The shift wasn't a single vulnerability disclosure or a new...