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Head to head · Guard moderation · October 2026 research run

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) vs Llama Guard 4

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) scores 59.6 (C) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Llama Guard 4 leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do guard moderation.

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails)Check Point · HTTP API C59.6/100#374 of 629 Llama Guard 4Meta · Model API D49.1/100#533 of 629

Which one, for what

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) C

Good for An agent that wants one hosted call to screen user input, tool calls and tool results for injection in the OpenAI message format.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 65 against 38
  • Schema & documentation, 86 against 52
  • Agent ergonomics, 77 against 67
  • Security & auth, 65 against 53

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

Prompts and outputs are stored for the dashboard by default

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.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 45 against 15
  • Maintenance & community, 28 against 21

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails)Llama Guard 4Edge
Reliability16%206538Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +27
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28652Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +34
Agent ergonomics13%16.27767Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +10
Security & auth14%17.56553Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +12
Payments & pricing10%12.51545Llama Guard 4 +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.82128Llama Guard 4 +7
Transparency & trust7%8.85755Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +2
Negative events≤1500
Total59.6 · C49.1 · D

Facts side by side

FactLakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails)Llama Guard 4
KindHTTP APIModel API
VendorCheck PointMeta
Hosted endpointhttps://api.lakera.ai/v2/guardno (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicencenoneLlama 4 Community Licence (source-available weights, not an OSI licence), with the Llama 4 acceptable use policy
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-06-082025-04-29
Terms last updatedno date given2025-04-05
Privacy policy last updated2026-06-01no document linked
Customer content may train modelsyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularitynone4.4k stars
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)none

Verdicts

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails)

OpenAI message format in, including tools, tool calls and tool results. Prompts and outputs are stored for the dashboard by default.

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

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails)

  1. Start the project in Detect mode and calibrate before Enforce. In Detect mode flagged is always false
  2. Send the whole conversation, but expect only the last user, assistant or tool turn to be scored
  3. Ask for breakdown=true and treat the confidence levels as a dial, not a boolean
  4. Turn off prompt logging in General Settings if the dashboard shouldn't hold user content
  5. Pin eu.api.lakera.ai or us.api.lakera.ai rather than api.lakera.ai when residency matters

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, Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) or Llama Guard 4?

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) scores 59.6 (C) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Llama Guard 4 leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

Do Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) and Llama Guard 4 need an API key?

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) needs an API key. Llama Guard 4 needs no key.

Can an agent call Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) and Llama Guard 4 without installing anything?

Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) has a hosted endpoint at https://api.lakera.ai/v2/guard. No hosted endpoint is listed for Llama Guard 4.

Other comparisons with Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) or Llama Guard 4

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