Protect AI has made a strategic move to enhance its capabilities with the acquisition of Laiyer AI, a prominent provider of open source software focused on securing large language models (LLMs). Laiyer AI’s LLM Guard software, specifically designed for detecting, redacting, and sanitizing inputs and outputs from LLMs, stands out for its efficiency in execution, requiring less inference latency and making it suitable for deployment on commercial CPUs instead of more expensive GPUs. This software will now be offered as an extension of Protect AI’s services, providing organizations with enhanced security measures for their AI models.
The acquisition aligns with Protect AI’s commitment to open source contributions, allowing continued support for the LLM Guard open source project. Protect AI President Daryan Dehghanpisheh emphasizes that this approach enables enterprise IT organizations to benefit from the open source project contributions while receiving commercial support and service extensions. LLM Guard, already the default security scanner for projects like LangChain, adds a layer of security to the workflows associated with building AI models.
Beyond immediate gains, this acquisition positions Protect AI to address emerging challenges in AI security, especially in the context of increasingly stringent AI regulations. The European Union has been at the forefront of defining AI regulations, and as regulations evolve globally, the need for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) capabilities for AI initiatives becomes imperative. Protect AI aims to contribute to the convergence of cybersecurity and compliance management, anticipating a rising demand for AI cybersecurity expertise amid the evolving threat landscape.
