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Head to head · Guard injection · October 2026 research run

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API vs LlamaFirewall

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API scores 61.3 (C) on agent readiness against LlamaFirewall's 50.8 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. LlamaFirewall leads on payments & pricing. Both do guard injection.

Cisco AI Defense Inspection APICisco Systems, Inc. · HTTP API C61.3/100#429 of 841 LlamaFirewallMeta · Agent framework D50.8/100#682 of 841

Which one, for what

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API C

Good for A company already buying Cisco security through Security Cloud Control that wants its own application to decide what to do with each verdict.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 80 against 53
  • Schema & documentation, 59 against 49
  • Agent ergonomics, 67 against 60
  • Security & auth, 81 against 56
  • Maintenance & community, 80 against 15
  • Transparency & trust, 76 against 58

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

No public price, free tier or trial for the Inspection API. Subscriptions are bought through sales and activated with a claim code

LlamaFirewall D

Good for A Python agent team that wants injection, hidden-character and generated-code checks in process, is willing to pin dependencies or install from main, and can get the gated weights.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 50 against 0

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Open source
  • No incidents deducted, where Cisco AI Defense Inspection API loses 3 points for them

Watch for

No PyPI release since 1.0.3 on 29 May 2025, and no changelog, tags or deprecation notes were found

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCisco AI Defense Inspection APILlamaFirewallEdge
Reliability16%208053Cisco AI Defense Inspection API +27
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.25949Cisco AI Defense Inspection API +10
Agent ergonomics13%16.26760Cisco AI Defense Inspection API +7
Security & auth14%17.58156Cisco AI Defense Inspection API +25
Payments & pricing10%12.5050LlamaFirewall +50
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88015Cisco AI Defense Inspection API +65
Transparency & trust7%8.87658Cisco AI Defense Inspection API +18
Negative events≤15-30
Total61.3 · C50.8 · D

Facts side by side

FactCisco AI Defense Inspection APILlamaFirewall
KindHTTP APIAgent framework
VendorCisco Systems, Inc.Meta
Hosted endpointhttps://us.api.inspect.aidefense.security.cisco.com/api/v1/inspect/chatno (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingPaidFree
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Cisco's General Terms and the AI Defense Offer Description. The Python SDK is Apache-2.0MIT (library). The Prompt Guard 2 weights it downloads are under the Llama 4 Community Licence
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-232025-05-29
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity35 stars, 4k PyPI/wk4.4k stars, 1k PyPI/wk

Verdicts

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.

LlamaFirewall

One scan() call runs several checks on the owner's machine and returns a short typed result. The last PyPI release is 1.0.3 from 29 May 2025, and its Prompt Guard loader imports a huggingface_hub class that current versions no longer export, so a fresh install needs older pins. The classifier weights also need Meta's manual approval.

Before you call either

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

LlamaFirewall

  1. Pin huggingface_hub below 1.0 and a matching transformers 4.x before importing the Prompt Guard scanner from the 1.0.3 wheel, or install from main
  2. Get access to meta-llama/Llama-Prompt-Guard-2-86M and set a Hugging Face token first. Without one the loader prompts for a login and a headless run stalls
  3. Call scan_async inside a running event loop. scan() wraps asyncio.run and fails there. scan_async returns score 0.0 and reason default on every allow
  4. Split text longer than 512 tokens yourself before a Prompt Guard scan. The library truncates and does not chunk
  5. Do not feed a block reason back to the model. The Prompt Guard reason quotes the full scanned text, and the hidden ASCII reason decodes the hidden payload

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cisco AI Defense Inspection API or LlamaFirewall?

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API scores 61.3 (C) on agent readiness against LlamaFirewall's 50.8 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. LlamaFirewall leads on payments & pricing.

Can an agent call Cisco AI Defense Inspection API and LlamaFirewall without installing anything?

Cisco AI Defense Inspection API has a hosted endpoint at https://us.api.inspect.aidefense.security.cisco.com/api/v1/inspect/chat. No hosted endpoint is listed for LlamaFirewall.

Are Cisco AI Defense Inspection API and LlamaFirewall open source?

No open-source release is listed for Cisco AI Defense Inspection API. LlamaFirewall is open source (MIT (library). The Prompt Guard 2 weights it downloads are under the Llama 4 Community Licence).

Other comparisons with Cisco AI Defense Inspection API or LlamaFirewall

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