In a world where generative AI models power everything from chatbots to complex enterprise systems, security is no longer an afterthought—it’s a necessity. Promptfoo, based in San Mateo, California, stands at the forefront of this new frontier, creating robust frameworks to protect AI systems from evolving threats.
Founded by seasoned security and engineering practitioners who have previously scaled generative AI products to hundreds of millions of users, Promptfoo was born out of a clear mission: to build the tools they wished they had while defending AI systems on the front lines.
Backed by Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and top figures in the technology and cybersecurity industries, Promptfoo has quickly established itself as the gold standard in AI red teaming and security testing—offering comprehensive protection across every layer of the AI stack.
Red Teaming for AI Applications
Promptfoo’s AI red teaming suite is designed to expose, understand, and eliminate vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Unlike traditional cybersecurity testing, which focuses on network or application vulnerabilities, AI red teaming dives deep into the behavioral and contextual weaknesses of language models and multimodal systems.
Comprehensive Coverage of AI Security Risks ensures that every possible attack vector—from prompt injections to data leaks—is thoroughly tested and mitigated.
Core Security Features That Set Promptfoo Apart
1. Prompt Injection & Jailbreaking
AI systems can be manipulated into bypassing safety guardrails or generating harmful outputs through cleverly crafted prompts. Promptfoo’s platform detects and prevents prompt injection and jailbreaking attempts, preserving the integrity of your model’s guardrails.
2. RAG Document Exfiltration
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are particularly vulnerable to data theft. Promptfoo protects against document exfiltration, preventing attackers from accessing sensitive or proprietary information within knowledge bases.
3. System Prompt Override
Malicious users often attempt to override a system’s base instructions. Promptfoo’s defenses ensure that core prompts and behavioral constraints remain intact, no matter how sophisticated the attack.
4. Malicious Resource Fetching
The platform safeguards against server-side request forgery (SSRF)—a technique that tricks AI models into fetching unauthorized data or communicating with restricted servers.
5. Data Privacy & PII Leaks
Promptfoo monitors interactions to detect and block personally identifiable information (PII) leaks across sessions, APIs, and chat-based systems, ensuring full compliance with privacy standards.
6. Harmful Content Generation
By filtering and blocking toxic, illegal, or dangerous content, Promptfoo provides AI systems with a consistent and reliable ethical shield across dozens of risk categories.
7. Unauthorized Data Access
Promptfoo’s proactive testing uncovers Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) vulnerabilities, preventing sensitive data exposure through improper access control.
8. Tool & Function Discovery
The platform detects and blocks tool discovery attacks, stopping adversaries from probing your AI’s connected functions and integrations.
9. Unsupervised Contracts
One of the most innovative defenses in Promptfoo’s arsenal—preventing AI models from creating unauthorized legal or business commitments that could expose organizations to liability.
Why Choose Promptfoo for Red Teaming
Promptfoo isn’t just another AI security platform—it’s a battle-tested industry standard trusted by foundation model labs, Fortune 50 enterprises, and over 200,000 open-source users worldwide.
Its custom attack generation system, powered by the latest ML techniques, dynamically adapts to your application’s context, generating realistic, evolving threats—not static, pre-defined jailbreaks.
Each test produces detailed vulnerability reports with actionable remediation steps, allowing teams to fix weaknesses fast. Through continuous monitoring, Promptfoo integrates with CI/CD pipelines to maintain a living record of your AI risk posture as your system evolves.
Organizations can choose cloud-based or on-premise deployments, ensuring full alignment with their compliance and data sovereignty requirements.
Adaptive AI Guardrails That Learn and Evolve
Traditional AI guardrails are static—they protect against known risks but struggle to adapt. Promptfoo’s adaptive guardrails change that by introducing self-improving protection.
The system continuously learns from real-world red team findings, evolving its defenses against new and emerging threats. It can even validate third-party guardrails, serving as an independent verification layer for enterprises already running existing safety systems.
Deployment is fast and flexible—requiring minimal code changes and supporting all major LLM providers and custom models. With data-driven improvement loops, every attempted breach strengthens the system, turning attack data into actionable defense intelligence.
End-to-End AI Model Security
Promptfoo offers a full-spectrum approach that covers every stage of an AI system’s lifecycle—from model file analysis to compliance verification.
1. Model File Security
Before deployment, Promptfoo analyzes model files for hidden threats such as malicious code, unsafe configurations, or suspicious operations. It supports major formats including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, Pickle, JSON, and YAML.
2. Behavioral Testing
Using simulation-based testing, the platform evaluates how your AI responds to jailbreaks, injections, and stress conditions, ensuring robustness under real-world attack scenarios.
3. Compliance Mapping
Promptfoo simplifies regulatory alignment by automatically mapping vulnerabilities and controls to key AI security frameworks such as:
· OWASP Top 10 for LLMs
· NIST AI Risk Management Framework
· EU AI Act
· MITRE ATLAS
Organizations can also define custom compliance policies, allowing for industry-specific or regional regulatory requirements.
A Vision for Secure and Responsible AI
Promptfoo isn’t just building products—it’s building a movement toward safer AI adoption. As generative models continue to integrate into critical systems across healthcare, finance, education, and government, the need for trustworthy AI becomes paramount.
By empowering developers, security teams, and enterprises with battle-tested tools, Promptfoo ensures that innovation never comes at the cost of safety.
In the fast-evolving world of artificial intelligence, Promptfoo is not merely keeping pace—it’s setting the standard for what secure AI should look like.
Ian Webster, CEO & Co-founder
Before founding Promptfoo, Ian Webster led the LLM engineering and developer platform teams at Discord, where he scaled AI products to serve over 200 million users—all while upholding the highest standards of safety, security, and compliance.
