Red Hat, as a provider of open source solutions, has announced the acquisition of Chatterbox Labs, a pioneer in AI model-agnostic security and protection mechanisms for generative AI.
This acquisition adds critical “AI security” capabilities to Red Hat AI’s portfolio, bolstering the company’s efforts to deliver a comprehensive, open-source enterprise AI platform designed for the hybrid cloud.
The announcement follows a year of rapid innovation for Red Hat AI, following the introduction of Red Hat AI Inference Server and the release of Red Hat AI 3. Customers around the world and in all industries are adopting Red Hat AI to drive innovation through generative, predictive and agentic AI applications.
As companies move from experimentation to production, they face a complex challenge: deploying models that are not only powerful, but also demonstrable, reliable, and secure. Security capabilities and protection mechanisms are a prerequisite for modern machine learning operations (MLOps).
This focus on security and trust reflects Red Hat and IBM’s commitment to helping customers adopt a security-first mindset as they responsibly scale AI in hybrid cloud environments. The integration of Chatterbox Labs technology creates a unified platform where security is integrated, strengthening Red Hat’s ability to enable production AI workloads with any model, on any accelerator, anywhere.
According to Steven Huels, vice president, AI Engineering and Product Strategy, Red Hat, “Enterprises are taking AI from the lab to production at high speed, making trusted, secure, and transparent AI deployments more urgent. Chatterbox Labs’ innovative security testing technology and model-agnostic protection mechanisms are the critical layer of ‘AI security’ the industry needs. By integrating Chatterbox Labs into the Red Hat AI portfolio, we reinforce our promise to “This acquisition will help customers to provide a complete, open source platform that not only allows them to run any model, anywhere, but do so with confidence that security is built in from the beginning. This acquisition will help enable truly responsible, production AI at scale.”
Unforeseen impacts of AI
Founded in 2011, Chatterbox Labs brings critical technology and expertise in AI security and transparency. Its expertise in quantitative AI risk has been praised by global independent think tanks and policymakers, and this acquisition brings key machine learning technology to Red Hat.
Chatterbox Labs offers automated and customized AI security and protection testing capabilities, providing the objective risk metrics business leaders need to approve AI deployment in production. The technology offers a robust, model-agnostic approach to validating data and models through:
- AIMI for Generative AI: Provides independent quantitative risk metrics for large language models (LLM).
- AIMI for predictive AI: Validates any AI architecture on key pillars, including robustness, fairness, and explainability.
- Protection mechanisms: Identify and fix unsafe, toxic, or biased prompts before putting models into production.
New generation of AI workloads
This acquisition aligns with Red Hat’s vision of supporting diverse hybrid cloud deployment models and environments. It also complements the forward-thinking capabilities introduced in Red Hat AI 3, specifically for agentic AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
As enterprises adopt agentic AI, trusted and secure models become even more critical, given the complex and autonomous role of AI agents and their potential impact on core business systems.
Chatterbox Labs Offers Automated and Customized AI Security and Protection Testing Capabilities
“As we extend AI systems into all aspects of business and society, we cannot allow security to become a proprietary black box,” said Stuart Battersby, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Chatterbox Labs. Therefore, “it is critical that AI protection mechanisms are not just deployed; they must be rigorously tested and supported by demonstrable metrics. Chatterbox Labs has been a pioneer in this discipline since the early days of AI. predictive to the agentic systems of tomorrow. By joining Red Hat, we can bring these validated and independent security metrics to the open source community. This transparency allows companies to verify security without depending on the vendor, enabling a future where we can all benefit from secure, scalable and open AI.
Chatterbox Labs has conducted research work on holistic agentic security, including monitoring agent responses and detecting triggers for MCP server actions. This work aligns with Red Hat’s roadmap for Llama Stack and MCP support, positioning Red Hat to secure the next generation of intelligent and automated workloads on a trusted, enterprise-ready foundation.
By combining Red Hat’s MLOps capabilities with Chatterbox Labs’ protection mechanisms capabilities, Red Hat will enable organizations to operationalize their AI investments with greater confidence.
