# 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts…

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lakera-guard-vs-llama-guard
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lakera-guard-vs-llama-guard.md (~2,500 tokens)
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- 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: 2026-10-08

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): grade C, 59.6/100, rank #424 of 722. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/lakera-guard.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/lakera-guard.json
- Llama Guard 4: grade D, 49.1/100, rank #614 of 722. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/llama-guard.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llama-guard.json

## 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

| Category | Weight | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) | Llama Guard 4 | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 65 | 38 | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +27 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 86 | 52 | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +34 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 77 | 67 | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +10 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 65 | 53 | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +12 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 15 | 45 | Llama Guard 4 +30 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 21 | 28 | Llama Guard 4 +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 57 | 55 | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) +2 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **59.6 · C** | **49.1 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) | Llama Guard 4 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model API |
| Vendor | Check Point | Meta |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.lakera.ai/v2/guard` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | 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 | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-06-08 | 2025-04-29 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2025-04-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-06-01 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | none | 4.4k stars |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (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.


## For agents

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

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

- [Amazon Bedrock Guardrails vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/amazon-bedrock-guardrails-vs-llama-guard.md)
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- [Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) vs NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lakera-guard-vs-nemo-guardrails.md)
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