Over the last year, as Snowflake has focused on putting AI tools in the hands of its customers, we have prioritized easy, efficient and safe enterprise generative AI. 

With that in mind, we’re happy to announce the general availability of safety guardrails for Snowflake Cortex AI with Cortex Guard, a new feature that enables enterprises to easily implement safeguards that filter out potentially inappropriate or unsafe large language model (LLM) responses. Cortex Guard introduces a foundational safety feature that further helps our customers feel confident moving from proof of concept to a production-ready gen AI application.

LLM safety measures help guide user interactions with LLMs by safeguarding users from potentially hateful, violent and other inappropriate responses. As gen AI applications move into production, the number of users will greatly increase — and so too will the opportunities for harmful interactions. Concern over controlling LLM content can block gen AI apps from moving into production and prevent businesses from realizing the opportunities available from LLMs. It's no surprise, then, that an important consideration for any Snowflake customer is the implementation of safety features in a way that maintains the ability to scale their applications to thousands of users without a significant cost or operational burden. 

A key component of LLM safety is setting up guardrails, which evaluate inputs and/or outputs to ensure they stay “on the track” of appropriate content. Guardrails strengthen governance by ensuring that businesses can still benefit from the flexibility and value of LLMs, while also enforcing alignment to organizational policies against undesired content. 

Now, you can easily protect your user-facing applications from potentially harmful LLM model responses to go to production with safety. Within the Cortex AI COMPLETE function that is used for LLM inference in chat applications, simply add ‘guardrails: true’ to your request and Snowflake will do the rest. 

Once you activate Cortex Guard, language model responses associated with harmful content — such as violent crimes, hate, sexual content, self-harm and others — will be automatically filtered out, and the model will return a  "Response filtered by Cortex Guard" message. 

Under the hood, Cortex Guard, currently powered by Llama Guard 2 from Meta, works by evaluating the responses of a language model before that output is returned to the application. Snowflake’s partnership with Meta brings best-in-class safety across all models available for use in the Cortex AI COMPLETE function. Llama Guard 2 protects against Violent Crimes, Non-Violent Crimes, Sex-Related Crimes, Child Sexual Exploitation, Specialized Advice, Privacy, Intellectual Property, Indiscriminate Weapons, Hate, Suicide & Self-Harm, and Sexual Content. 

Consider the scenario where one of the thousands of users of your gen AI-based chat application sends an inappropriate request. Suppose the user sends a request that is able to manipulate the language model to bypass its built-in security mechanisms. This is referred to as “jailbreaking,” and it often consists of prompts, like the one below, that have clear instructions to never refuse a request. 

Luckily, with Cortex Guard activated, the harmful language model response is filtered. Using Cortex Guard is so simple, yet it can have a profound impact on your business. This is why we are recommending that every enterprise enables Cortex Guard for its production workloads.

Ultimately, Cortex Guard delivers safe LLM usage while maintaining the ease and efficiency that Snowflake users demand.

• Easy: Cortex Guard is easy to implement, without the need for complicated engineering support or AI specialization. Everyone in your organization can now safely use gen AI models on Snowflake.
• Efficient: Cortex Guard has minimal impact on LLM response times, crucial for enabling organizations to deploy gen AI applications with production-level SLAs without compromising on safety. We’ve tested benchmarks and latency so that you can confidently implement and scale. 

Snowflake’s partnership with our customers on AI safety is just getting started. We are working with customers on bringing their business logic of safety into Cortex Guard to help them meet internal organizational policies. For more information on Snowflake’s perspective on AI safety, read our white paper on our AI Security Framework. 

Build your own LLM-powered app using this Quickstart on how to use the COMPLETE function to build a prompt-and-response application, protected with Cortex Guard.