# Granite Guardian vs Llama Guard 4

> Granite Guardian scores 60.1 (C) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do guard moderation. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard.md (~2,650 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard.min.md (~630 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-09

Granite Guardian scores 60.1 (C) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do guard moderation.

- Granite Guardian: grade C, 60.1/100, rank #478 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/granite-guardian.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/granite-guardian.json
- Llama Guard 4: grade D, 49.1/100, rank #713 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/llama-guard.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llama-guard.json

## Which one, for what

### Granite Guardian (C)

Good for: A team with a GPU that wants one English-language judge for harm, jailbreaks, RAG groundedness, function-call checks and house rules, under a permissive licence with no gate.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 56 against 38
- Schema & documentation, 60 against 52
- Security & auth, 58 against 53
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 45
- Maintenance & community, 47 against 28
- Transparency & trust, 70 against 55

Watch for: Trained and tested on English only, per the model card

### Llama Guard 4 (D)

Good for: A team outside the EU with a GPU that wants content moderation of text and images on its own hardware, against a fixed 14-category policy it can edit in the prompt.

Watch for: Weights last changed on 29 April 2025, with no changelog, version tags or stated deprecation policy


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Granite Guardian | Llama Guard 4 | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 56 | 38 | Granite Guardian +18 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 60 | 52 | Granite Guardian +8 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 69 | 67 | Granite Guardian +2 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 58 | 53 | Granite Guardian +5 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 60 | 45 | Granite Guardian +15 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 47 | 28 | Granite Guardian +19 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 70 | 55 | Granite Guardian +15 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **60.1 · C** | **49.1 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Granite Guardian | Llama Guard 4 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model API | Model API |
| Vendor | IBM | Meta |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 for the weights and the repository | Llama 4 Community Licence (source-available weights, not an OSI licence), with the Llama 4 acceptable use policy |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-04-29 | 2025-04-29 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | 2025-04-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models |  | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access |  | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking |  | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice |  | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver |  | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 182 stars | 4.4k stars |

## Verdicts

**Granite Guardian.** One ungated Apache 2.0 model judges harm, jailbreaks, RAG groundedness, function-call errors and custom criteria, with signed weights and published evaluation code. It is trained and tested on English only, each call checks one criterion, the 4.1 prompt format differs from 3.x, and IBM's watsonx.ai lists only the deprecated 3.0 model.

**Llama Guard 4.** A single self-hosted model classifies text and multi-image prompts against 14 MLCommons-aligned hazard categories and answers in a few tokens. The weights have not changed since 29 April 2025, download access needs Meta's manual approval, and the licence withholds the grant from individuals and companies based in the European Union.

## Before you call either

### Granite Guardian

1. Append the `<guardian>` block as the final user message, with the mode line, `### Criteria:` and `### Scoring Schema:`. Copy the strings from the model card, because no package builds them
2. Use the no-think instruction for gating and parse `<score>`. Think mode writes a reasoning trace first, and the card's examples allow up to 2,048 output tokens
3. Treat `yes` as the criterion being met, which for built-in criteria means the risk is present. Treat a missing `<score>` tag as a failed check
4. Pass retrieved text through `documents=` and tool schemas through `available_tools=` in `apply_chat_template`, not inside the message text
5. Under Ollama, set `num_ctx` in the request options. IBM's docs say the default context is short and long requests are truncated

### Llama Guard 4

1. Request access on the Hugging Face page before anything else. Approval is manual, and the form cannot be edited after submission
2. Send only the user turn to check an input, and the user turn plus the model's answer to check an output. The template picks the role from the message count
3. Parse the first line for `safe` or `unsafe` and the second for category codes. Set `max_new_tokens` to about 10 and turn sampling off
4. Do not send an image with no text. Meta says the model is not an image-only classifier, and S14 is skipped when an image is present
5. Pair it with a prompt-attack detector. The card says the model can itself be moved by adversarial or injected text

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Granite Guardian or Llama Guard 4?

Granite Guardian scores 60.1 (C) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in every scored category.

### Do Granite Guardian and Llama Guard 4 need an API key?

Neither needs a key.

### Can an agent call Granite Guardian and Llama Guard 4 without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Granite Guardian. No hosted endpoint is listed for Llama Guard 4.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "granite-guardian", "b": "llama-guard"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare granite-guardian llama-guard`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/granite-guardian.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llama-guard.json

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