LLM Guard alternatives: what to use now that it is archived

Honesty first: for a few teams, staying put is rational. The MIT licence is irrevocable, the code is battle-tested, and if your threat model is narrow — say, regex-class secret detection and toxicity scoring on an internal tool — a pinned, audited fork can serve for a while. But own the maths: you inherit 35 scanners and their model dependencies, attacks evolve monthly, and every upstream CVE in the dependency tree is now yours to patch. Treat a fork as a deliberate maintenance project with an owner and a budget — not as "nothing changed". If you would not fund that project, you are looking for one of the options below.

If you chose LLM Guard because it was open source and self-hosted, NeuralTrust's TrustGate is the closest actively developed equivalent in 2026 — with an architectural difference worth understanding: LLM Guard was a library you embedded in your Python code; TrustGate is a gateway (Apache-2.0, written in Go) that your traffic passes through, deployed as Docker, Kubernetes or a single binary. Nothing needs to leave your infrastructure, and the company behind it (Barcelona and London) raised a $20M seed in June 2026, so development is funded. The counterpoints: the community is still young, and moving from in-code scanners to a gateway is a real refactor, not a drop-in swap. We compared NeuralTrust against the whole field on a dedicated page.

Disclosure: Senthex is us — judge this section accordingly, and check the claims against the linked pages.

If the LLM Guard archive taught you anything, it may be that you do not want to be in the detection-maintenance business at all. Senthex is that trade: a maintained runtime firewall you integrate by swapping a base URL — one line of code in front of OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral or Gemini — covering the ground you used LLM Guard for (prompt-injection detection, PII redaction, secret and leak scanning), plus something the library never attempted: a verifiable, tamper-evident audit trail. In the v1.1.7 pilot, each record is chained with SHA-256 and anchored to an RFC 3161 timestamp, verifiable offline — try it on a real bundle — which maps to EU AI Act record-keeping (Articles 12 & 19). Like LLM Guard's ethos, minimisation is the default: raw request and response bodies are excluded from storage (data minimisation), and you can self-host, including on Azure, or use the EU-hosted service (Hetzner Falkenstein, Germany). Our detection research is published with frozen datasets — ATLAS and RELAY — so you can see behaviour before you commit. Pricing is public, with a free tier.

When Senthex is not the right choice: if your policy is strictly self-maintained open source (fork LLM Guard or adopt TrustGate); if you want scanners inside your own code path rather than a proxy hop; if you need enterprise red-teaming at category-leader scale (Lakera/Check Point); or if you are a Palo Alto shop already committed to Prisma AIRS. See also what we do and do not claim on EU AI Act compliance.

If you are replacing LLM Guard because its detection quality stopped improving, Lakera is the option that optimises hardest for detection: adversarial data at a scale nobody else has published — Check Point's announcement cites over 80 million adversarial patterns from the Gandalf game — a public benchmark (PINT), and documented self-hosting down to air-gapped deployments. It is enterprise software with quote-based pricing, inside Check Point since late 2025, and the same post-acquisition dynamics that hit LLM Guard apply — which is exactly why we wrote an honest page on Lakera and its alternatives.

Fairness requires saying it: Palo Alto Networks did not kill Protect AI's technology, it absorbed it. Prisma AIRS is the platform where that work now lives, and for existing Palo Alto customers — or Protect AI enterprise customers whose contracts migrated — it is the path of least resistance, with model scanning and AI-security capabilities well beyond what the open-source library did. The trade-offs are the standard enterprise-platform ones: sales-led pricing with no public numbers, platform commitment, and deployment details that are not publicly documented. If you loved LLM Guard precisely because it was not that, Prisma AIRS is the option you will rule out fastest — but it belongs on this list.

AI Gateway shows up in every LLM-infrastructure search, so let's place it precisely: it is an operations gateway — analytics, caching, rate limiting, fallback, free at its core — not a scanner replacement. Its Guardrails feature does content moderation via Llama Guard; prompt-injection detection is a separate WAF add-on (AI Security for Apps, formerly Firewall for AI) gated to Enterprise plans, and there is no self-hosting. If what you used LLM Guard for is security scanning, AI Gateway alone does not cover it — though it composes well underneath any of the security options above. Full analysis: Cloudflare AI Gateway alternatives.