Amazon Bedrock Guardrails vs Cisco AI Defense Inspection API

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails

ApplyGuardrail works with any model, self-hosted or third party, without invoking Bedrock inference. Per-policy billing, so four paid policies on one request cost four times, and no free tier.

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API

Per-connection API keys with expiry, revocation and regeneration, published limits of 60,000 calls a minute, weekly dated release notes and a one-year retention statement suit companies already on Cisco Security Cloud Control. Access needs a subscription bought through sales, with no public price or trial for the API, and the developer changelog has one entry from February 2025.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails

1. Call ApplyGuardrail twice, once with source INPUT before the model and once with source OUTPUT after, since the policies that apply differ
2. Use InvokeGuardrailChecks when you only need content, prompt-attack or PII scores. It needs no guardrail id and runs in detect-only mode
3. Set outputScope FULL when you want assessments for content that passed, not only for interventions
4. Budget in text units of 1,000 characters per policy. A 5,000-character tool result is five units on every paid policy
5. Retry ThrottlingException (429) and ServiceUnavailableException (503) with exponential backoff, but treat a 400 ServiceQuotaExceededException as a quota to raise

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API

1. Send the key in X-Cisco-AI-Defense-API-Key to POST /api/v1/inspect/chat on the regional host where the tenant was created. US, Europe and Asia Pacific hosts differ
2. If the connection has a policy, enabled_rules in the request is ignored. Pass enabled_rules only for connections with no policy
3. The API never blocks anything itself. Read is_safe and action in the response and enforce the decision in your own code
4. On 429, wait and retry. The organisation has gone over one million tokens in parallel or 60,000 calls a minute
5. Don't request the Toxicity rule. It was removed on 16 September 2026, and the Safety rules such as Hate Speech, Harassment and Profanity replace it