OneShield -- the Next Generation of LLM Guardrails

Abstract: The rise of LLMs has created a general excitement about the great potential for a myriad of applications. While LLMs offer many possibilities, questions about safety, privacy, and ethics have emerged, and all the key actors are working to address these issues with protective measures for their own models and standalone solutions. The constantly evolving nature of LLMs makes the task of universally shielding users against their potential risks extremely challenging, and one-size-fits-all solutions unfeasible. In this work, we propose OneShield, our stand-alone, model-agnostic and customizable solution to safeguard LLMs. OneShield aims to provide facilities for defining risk factors, expressing and declaring contextual safety and compliance policies, and mitigating LLM risks, with a focus on each specific customer. We describe the implementation of the framework, the scalability considerations and provide usage statistics of OneShield since its first deployment.