Red Hat acquires Chatterbox Labs to strengthen AI safety and security guardrails

Red Hat Acquires Another AI Company

"As enterprises move AI from experimentation to production, the ability to monitor models for bias, toxicity, and vulnerabilities is critical. Guardrails and safety testing have become "table stakes" for modern MLOps and LLMOps platforms. This acquisition directly addresses the growing need for "security for AI." By integrating Chatterbox Labs technology, Red Hat aims to provide a comprehensive enterprise open source AI platform that enables customers to run production workloads with confidence." "Red Hat has a long history of acquiring proprietary technology and open sourcing it to drive innovation and community adoption. We plan to follow our standard open source development model with Chatterbox Labs' technology, making these critical safety tools accessible to the broader community over time."

Red Hat Promises AI Safety Boost Through Chatterbox Labs Acquisition

'This acquisition will help enable truly responsible, production-grade AI at scale,' says Steven Huels, Red Hat vice president of AI engineering and product strategy. IBM open-source enterprise tools subsidiary Red Hat is boosting artificial intelligence safety, security and guardrail capabilities in its product portfolio through the acquisition of Chatterbox Labs. Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat has closed on its purchase of the London-based company, founded in 2011, and will leverage Chatterbox's capabilities for demonstrable, trustworthy and safe deployment of AI in production instead of just experimentation, according to the vendor. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. "Enterprises are moving AI from the lab to production with great speed, which elevates the urgency for trusted, secure and transparent AI deployments," Steven Huels, Red Hat vice president of AI engineering and product strategy, said in a statement. "This acquisition will help enable truly responsible, production-grade AI at scale." Stuart Battersby, Chatterbox co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement that joining Red Hat helps distribute Chatterbox's capabilities across the open-source community and to businesses looking for safety verification without vendor lock-in. "As AI systems proliferate across every aspect of business and society, we cannot allow safety to become a proprietary black box," Battersby said. "It is critical that AI guardrails are not merely deployed; they must be rigorously tested and supported by demonstrable metrics." The new Chatterbox capabilities will help Red Hat users building machine learning operations (MLOps) practices and with AI scaling across hybrid cloud environments, also an important market for Red Hat parent IBM. Although Red Hat is part of IBM, its technology works with any cloud vendor, any model and any accelerator. Chatterbox's portfolio ranges from the AI Model Insights (AIMI) platform for delivering independent quantitative risk metrics for large language models (LLMs) and pinpointing and remedying prompts for bias, toxicity and other dangers before models enter production. The platform also validates AI architecture for robustness, fairness, explainability and other pillars, according to Red Hat. Chatterbox can monitor AI agent responses and detect Model Context Protocol (MCP) server action triggers, building upon agentic capabilities Red Hat has put into products such as Red Hat AI 3.