Red Hat has been busy expanding its AI portfolio this year. The company launched Red Hat AI 3 with support for agentic AI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) a few months ago. And before that, it had added Red Hat AI Inference Server, RHEL AI, and Red Hat AI third-party validated models to its list of offerings.
Now, they have announced the acquisition of Chatterbox Labs, an AI safety company based in London. Red Hat says it plans to open source their technology over time, following its usual approach of acquiring proprietary tech and releasing it to the community.
Red Hat's Latest Purchase
Founded in 2011, Chatterbox Labs has spent over a decade working on AI risk and safety testing. The company built the AIMI platform, which provides model-agnostic validation for AI systems.
The platform has three main offerings. AIMI for Gen AI delivers quantitative risk metrics for large language models (LLMs). AIMI for Predictive AI validates traditional AI architectures for robustness, fairness, and explainability. And Guardrails catches insecure, toxic, or biased prompts before models hit production.
Beyond that, the platform can actively probe models for vulnerabilities like prompt injection, jailbreaking, and data leakage.
For existing Red Hat customers, this acquisition means safety tooling built into the platform rather than bolted on later. It should bolster Red Hat's existing AI products and add a "security for AI" stamp to their portfolio.
The Vice President of AI Engineering and Product Strategy at Red Hat, Steven Huels, had the following to say about their new acquisition:
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.
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Sourav Rudra
