Red Hat has announced the acquisition of Chatterbox Labs, a company specializing in model-agnostic AI safety and generative AI guardrails. The move is intended to strengthen Red Hat’s AI portfolio by adding advanced security and safety testing capabilities, aiming to support responsible deployment of artificial intelligence at scale.
Chatterbox Labs, founded in 2011, brings expertise in quantitative AI risk assessment and has been recognized by global think tanks and policymakers for its work in AI transparency. Its technology provides automated, customizable tools for assessing risks associated with deploying AI models into production environments. These include independent metrics for large language models (LLMs), validation of predictive AI architectures across factors such as robustness and fairness, and systems designed to identify insecure or biased prompts before models are used operationally.
Steven Huels, vice president of AI Engineering and Product Strategy at Red Hat, stated: “Enterprises are moving AI from the lab to production with great speed, which elevates the urgency for trusted, secure and transparent AI deployments. Chatterbox Labs’s innovative, model-agnostic safety testing and guardrail technology is the critical ‘security for AI’ layer that the industry needs. By integrating Chatterbox Labs into the Red Hat AI portfolio, we are strengthening our promise to customers to provide a comprehensive, open source platform that not only enables them to run any model, anywhere, but to do so with the confidence that safety is built in from the start. This acquisition will help enable truly responsible, production-grade AI at scale.”
Stuart Battersby, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Chatterbox Labs added: “As AI systems proliferate across every aspect of business and society, we cannot allow safety to become a proprietary black box. It is critical that AI guardrails are not merely deployed; they must be rigorously tested and supported by demonstrable metrics. Chatterbox Labs has pioneered this discipline from the early days of predictive AI through to the agentic systems of tomorrow. By joining Red Hat, we can bring these validated, independent safety metrics to the open source community. This transparency allows businesses to verify safety without lock-in, enabling a future where we can all benefit from AI that is secure, scalable and open.”
The acquisition comes after a period of rapid development within Red Hat’s artificial intelligence offerings—including recent releases such as Red Hat AI Inference Server and Red Hat AI 3—which have been adopted globally across industries seeking generative and predictive applications.
Red Hat’s integration of Chatterbox Labs’ technology aligns with its broader strategy for supporting diverse models on hybrid cloud infrastructure while addressing growing concerns about unintended consequences stemming from advanced machine learning operations (MLOps). The combination aims to provide enterprises with unified tools needed for operationalizing trustworthy artificial intelligence solutions.
For more information about frequently asked questions regarding this acquisition visit: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquires-chatterbox-labs-ai-safety
