Discussion – has anyone build a firewall for AI models yet? | Hacker News Reader

Discussion – has anyone build a firewall for AI models yet?

3 pointsAkhiljp11 comments

Trying to figure out if there are already companies that have build firewall like products for AI models. Assuming everyone will now start hosting open source models to control their destiny, I wonder if this is a large market for startups to go after.

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I am not a firewall or security expert but would you have organizations protect their sensitive data from AI's reach thereby limiting AI's ability ? Wouldn't the real ROI of AI will depend on the sensitive data ?

I guess dynamic firewall's with runtime permissions are needed protect the data and at the same time let AI do it's thing.

I beg to differ - manipulating a model to extract data is worse that protecting sensitive data. I am curious as to why this is not a big space yet?

We already have many components and solutions for "firewalls", like everything we've done with microservice isolation. If you mean "sandbox" more than "firewall", there are 100s since Claude Code came out

So my first thesis that I want to prove is - are all enterprises going to start self hosting open source models ? If yes, then one will need to deploy a solution around the models to act as a firewall. A firewall fine tuned for the context that’s coming in and coming out of a model. Way different from how microservices work today.

1. Most enterprises are not self hosting at this point, hardware is too expensive. We want model choice. Eg. we are buying Fireworks.ai, however this is irrelevant to point 2

2. "firewall" is the wrong term, you are looking for "guardrails" if you are talking about prompt protections. Here again, there are 100s of projects and takes on this. Ai is the hottest space right now, people are thinking about all of these things. This piece is central to Fable access being shut off.

Ack on the guardrail analogy. On fireworks - do you just run serverless or do you take their dedicated instance. My question is how do you ensure that the model is not being manipulated to getting stuff it shouldn’t be.

"guardrail" is not an analogy, it is the term used in industry, you can search "ai guardrails" or "agent guardrails"

My bad. Wasn’t aware. Thank you.

Looking forward to understanding the second part of this.

In fireworks - how does one build guardrails or it does not matter to companies hosting their models on fireworks?

It doesn't matter where the models are, that's just a traditional API server. The agent harness is the thing that can read files and make http calls (to exfiltrate) and that's regular software running somewhere else. So one typically puts the harness in a sandbox and puts extra LLM calls in to guardrail (prompt / tool call checks).

I'm planning to do something like this for myself as an OpenCode plugin, but to stop my message and record it for clarity or block angry

When you say firewalls for AI models, you mean firewalls for agents, right? Otherwise, I don't see the need to firewall a model.

I meant for a model. Like agents could be many within an organization, instead of patching up each agent with a security solution, wouldn’t it be easier to build one that wraps around the model ?

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