Red Hat has acquired Chatterbox Labs, expanding its Red Hat AI portfolio with what the company described as “security for AI” capabilities to help enterprises deploy production-grade AI that is trustworthy, transparent, and safe at scale.
The deal brings Chatterbox Labs’ automated AI security and safety testing technology into Red Hat’s open-source-oriented enterprise AI platform for the hybrid cloud. Red Hat said the integration is designed to give organizations stronger tools to evaluate models, validate data, and apply guardrails before moving workloads from experimentation into production environments. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Red Hat positioned the acquisition as a continuation of a busy year for its AI efforts, citing product launches such as Red Hat AI Inference Server and Red Hat AI 3. The company said customers across industries are adopting its stack for generative, predictive, and agentic AI use cases, and that the biggest challenge now is deploying models that are not only powerful but also demonstrably safe and secure as AI becomes more embedded in core business systems.
Founded in 2011, Chatterbox Labs focuses on quantitative AI risk, safety testing, and generative AI guardrails that can be applied across different model types. Red Hat said Chatterbox Labs’ approach provides factual risk metrics intended to support enterprise decision-making about when an AI system is ready for production deployment.
Red Hat highlighted three areas of Chatterbox Labs’ offering that it expects to incorporate into its platform. The first is AIMI for gen AI, which produces quantitative risk metrics for large language models. The second is AIMI for predictive AI, which evaluates a wide range of AI architectures across pillars such as robustness, fairness, and explainability. The third is guardrails that identify and address insecure, toxic, or biased prompts before models are used in production settings.
The acquisition also aligns with Red Hat’s roadmap for agentic AI, including support for the Model Context Protocol and related capabilities. Red Hat said that as autonomous agents take on more complex roles, the need for trusted and secure models increases, given the potential impact on mission-critical workflows. The company noted Chatterbox Labs’ investigative work on agent security, including monitoring agent responses and detecting MCP server action triggers, as an area it intends to build on as it advances Llama Stack and MCP support.
Red Hat said combining its MLOps capabilities with Chatterbox Labs’ testing and guardrail technology will help organizations operationalize AI investments with greater confidence, while maintaining flexibility to run models across different accelerators and deployment environments.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Steven Huels, Vice President, AI Engineering and Product Strategy, Red Hat
“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.”
Stuart Battersby, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Chatterbox Labs
