As GenAI systems become more complex and their use more widespread, the need to protect them is increasingly urgent. Unfortunately, traditional cybersecurity defenses are not designed to protect AI models, applications, and agents. Traditional cybersecurity is designed to protect static systems, not dynamic, semi-autonomous systems that process massive amounts of data in real time.
New technologies require new defenses. In this blog, we define GenAI runtime defense (GARD), explain how it works and its benefits, and finally why internal guardrails aren’t enough.
What is GenAI runtime defense?
GenAI runtime defense, a term introduced by Gartner, is a security technology that monitors, detects, and prevents attacks on GenAI systems in real time. It protects GenAI systems like large language models (LLMs), image generators, and code assistants. It allows organizations to implement security policies that help prevent attacks. GARD typically monitors both inputs and outputs to models to ensure their safety and security.
Key components of GARD include the following:
- Real-time security and safety enforcement: Think of it as a digital bodyguard for your GenAI system that’s constantly on duty, inspecting every prompt and response as they happen. The goal is to stop threats in their tracks, whether it’s a jailbreak attempt or a malicious manipulation of the model.
- Robust and customizable security policies: Each AI deployment needs its own rules. By giving security teams a policy engine as flexible as a Swiss Army knife, they can fine-tune access, content constraints, and behavior controls to fit a specific risk profile, compliance need, or use cases.
- Behavior and topic monitoring: It’s important to keep an eye on both inputs and outputs to ensure nothing harmful, malicious, or illegal slips through. GARD flags risky topics, suspicious behavior, and out-of-bounds content in real time before your AI says something you can’t take back.
- Auditing/reporting capabilities: As with so many things in life, in cybersecurity, you need a paper trail. GARD allows you to log interactions and security events to give you the visibility and evidence needed for audits, compliance, and continuous improvement.
GenAI runtime defense (GARD) core capabilities
GARD is designed with several functionalities that address the specific needs of GenAI systems. This includes the following:
- Stopping adversarial attacks in real time: Prevent malicious attacks aimed at manipulating the model, like prompt injections and jailbreaks or those that could potentially expose sensitive data, PII, IP, and more.
- Blocking inappropriate or offensive content: Stop unsafe or toxic prompts and responses such as hate speech, nonviolent crime, and more.
- Enforcing policy or compliance controls: Provide flexible policies and the oversight needed to meet regulatory obligations and internal governance standards
In addition to these core capabilities, GARD is built to adapt and evolve alongside your GenAI deployments. As models are integrated into more complex and high-stakes environments, the risk landscape shifts. Whether it’s integrating with existing security infrastructure, supporting audit trails for incident response, or enabling proactive threat detection through behavioral analytics, GARD acts as a strategic layer in your overall AI security posture.
Why you need GenAI runtime defense (GARD)
You need GARD for several reasons. First, the attack surface for AI models, applications, and agents is both expanding and growing more complex. As GenAI becomes more sophisticated, the potential for exposure increases as well.
Second, the risks at runtime are real. From adversarial attacks and harmful actions to PII leaks and biased reasoning, we are already seeing real-world security impact. These threats can create significant business risk, introduce compliance issues, impact user trust, and cause reputational damage to the business.
Finally, traditional security is not designed to address the unique requirements of AI systems. Traditional security is built for deterministic systems with fixed inputs and predictable behavior. For example, traditional security is not able to secure the probabilistic nature of GenAI, understand the context required to identify prompt manipulations, or identify when outputs could be unsafe or include sensitive data.
To address and meet the needs of AI security, you need a purpose-built solution designed to solve these unique challenges. This is where GARD comes in. GARD is a purpose-built solution designed specifically to address the security challenges of GenAI. GARD monitors both inputs and outputs and understands AI behavior in real time to deliver protection based on context and intent.
Why you need an external solution
It’s important to understand that AI models can’t reliably guard themselves. They’re not designed with defense in mind. They're built to perform, to predict, and to learn. Furthermore, the people building AI models are data scientists. Their focus is on optimizing accuracy, reducing bias, increasing performance, not securing the model from adversarial threats. Data scientists are not security experts, nor should we expect them to be.
More and more, organizations are using frontier or open source models. Most of them come with either limited or no built-in safety mechanisms. Even cutting-edge systems lack the depth of protective layers organizations demand from traditional software.
For these reasons, it doesn’t make sense for security to live inside the model. Just like we don’t expect databases to secure themselves — we use firewalls, access controls, monitoring tools, and more — we shouldn’t expect AI to secure itself either. To be effective, security needs to be layered around the model, not buried inside it. An external AI security solution is the only solution.
Securing the future of GenAI
Securing GenAI is more than just a technical challenge. It’s a business imperative. The risk increases as these systems become more powerful and embedded in critical workflows. GARD offers a purpose-built way to defend GenAI at runtime. It gives security teams the context, visibility, and control they need to stay ahead of threats.
How TrojAI can help
At TrojAI, we’re building security for AI to help organizations protect their GenAI deployments.
Our mission is to enable the secure rollout of AI in the enterprise. Our comprehensive security platform for AI protects AI models, applications, and agents. Our best-in-class platform empowers enterprises to safeguard AI systems both at build time and run time. TrojAI Detect automatically red teams AI models, safeguarding model behavior and delivering remediation guidance at build time. TrojAI Defend is our GenAI Runtime Defense solution that protects enterprises from threats in real time.
By assessing the risk of AI model behavior during the AI development lifecycle and protecting it at run time, we deliver comprehensive security for your AI models, applications, and agents.
Want to learn more about how TrojAI secures the largest enterprises globally with a highly scalable, performant, and extensible solution?
Check us out at troj.ai now.
