OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124

OpenGuardrails is an open-source, enterprise-grade AI security platform that provides configurable policy control, a unified LLM-based guard architecture, and low-latency deployment for production systems.

This repository releases OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124 — a lightweight, non-quantized ~4B parameter language model designed for content safety detection and prompt attack prevention, with broad GPU compatibility and strong real-time performance.

📄 Technical Report: OpenGuardrails: A Configurable, Unified, and Scalable Guardrails Platform for Large Language Models

Key Contributions

1. Configurable Safety Policy Mechanism

OpenGuardrails introduces a dynamic and configurable safety policy framework that allows organizations to flexibly define unsafe categories and detection thresholds based on business risk tolerance.

The model outputs probabilistic confidence signals, enabling fine-grained tuning of safety sensitivity across different scenarios and applications.

2. Unified LLM-based Guard Architecture

A single language model performs both:

• Content safety classification
• Prompt attack detection (prompt injection, jailbreaks, malicious instruction following)

This unified approach eliminates the need for hybrid pipelines (e.g. rule engines + small classifiers), resulting in stronger semantic reasoning and simpler deployment.

3. Lightweight, Non-Quantized Design

OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124 is intentionally designed as a non-quantized dense model, offering:

• Broader compatibility across consumer, data-center, and cloud GPUs
• Stable numerical behavior without quantization artifacts
• Easier integration with standard inference stacks (Transformers, vLLM)

Despite its compact size, the model maintains strong detection accuracy and low inference latency.

4. Efficient and Scalable Performance

With ~4B parameters, the model achieves low-latency, real-time inference suitable for:

• API gateways
• LLM firewalls
• Agent guardrails
• Enterprise moderation pipelines

It can be deployed on a single GPU without specialized quantization toolchains.

5. Multilingual & Cross-Domain Coverage

The model supports 119 languages and dialects, providing robust safety protection for global applications. It performs consistently on both prompt-level and response-level classification tasks.

6. Open Safety Data Contribution

We release OpenGuardrailsMixZh-97k, a multilingual safety dataset composed of aligned translations from:

• ToxicChat
• WildGuardMix
• PolyGuard
• XSTest
• BeaverTails

The dataset is publicly available on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 License.

7. State-of-the-Art Safety Performance

OpenGuardrails achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across multiple safety benchmarks, excelling in:

• Prompt attack detection
• Harmful content classification
• English, Chinese, and multilingual evaluations

All models are released under the Apache 2.0 License for unrestricted commercial and research use.

Performance overview:

Detection Dimensions

Quick Start

Using Transformers

pip install torch transformers accelerate

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "openguardrails/OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124"

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_name,
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto"
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "How can I make a bomb?"}]
text = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True
)

inputs = tokenizer([text], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=10)

response = tokenizer.decode(
    outputs[0][len(inputs.input_ids[0]):],
    skip_special_tokens=True
)
print(response)
# unsafe\nS5

Using vLLM (Recommended)

vllm serve openguardrails/OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124 \
  --served-model-name OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124 \
  --max-model-len 8192 \
  --port 8000

OpenAI-Compatible API

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1")

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Tell me how to make explosives"}]
result = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="OpenGuardrails-Text-4B-0124",
    messages=messages,
    temperature=0.0
)

print(result.choices[0].message.content)
# unsafe\nS5

Output Format

License

Released under the Apache License 2.0, allowing:

• ✅ Commercial use
• ✅ Modification and redistribution
• ✅ Private / on-premise deployment

License text: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Related Resources

• Website: https://www.openguardrails.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/openguardrails/openguardrails

Citation

@misc{openguardrails,
  title={OpenGuardrails: A Configurable, Unified, and Scalable Guardrails Platform for Large Language Models},
  author={Thomas Wang and Haowen Li},
  year={2025},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19169},
}