As generative AI adoption accelerates across enterprises, maintaining safe, responsible, and compliant AI interactions has never been more critical. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards that help organizations build generative AI applications with industry-leading safety protections. With Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, you can implement safeguards in your generative AI applications that are customized to your use cases and responsible AI policies. You can create multiple guardrails tailored to different use cases and apply them across multiple foundation models (FMs), improving user experiences and standardizing safety controls across generative AI applications. Beyond Amazon Bedrock models, the service offers the flexible ApplyGuardrails API that enables you to assess text using your pre-configured guardrails without invoking FMs, allowing you to implement safety controls across generative AI applications—whether running on Amazon Bedrock or on other systems—at both input and output levels.
Today, we’re announcing a significant enhancement to Amazon Bedrock Guardrails: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy-based enforcement. This powerful capability enables security and compliance teams to establish mandatory guardrails for every model inference call, making sure organizational safety policies are consistently enforced across AI interactions. This feature enhances AI governance by enabling centralized control over guardrail implementation.
Challenges with building generative AI applications
Organizations deploying generative AI face critical governance challenges: content appropriateness, where models might produce undesirable responses to problematic prompts; safety concerns, with potential generation of harmful content even from innocent prompts; privacy protection requirements for handling sensitive information; and consistent policy enforcement across AI deployments.
Perhaps most challenging is making sure that appropriate safeguards are applied consistently across AI interactions within an organization, regardless of which team or individual is developing or deploying applications.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails capabilities
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails enables you to implement safeguards in generative AI applications customized to your specific use cases and responsible AI policies. Guardrails currently supports six types of policies:
- Content filters – Configurable thresholds across six harmful categories: hate, insults, sexual, violence, misconduct, and prompt injections
- Denied topics – Definition of specific topics to be avoided in the context of an application
- Sensitive information filters – Detection and removal of personally identifiable information (PII) and custom regex entities to protect user privacy
- Word filters – Blocking of specific words in generative AI applications, such as harmful words, profanity, or competitor names and products
- Contextual grounding checks – Detection and filtering of hallucinations in model responses by verifying if the response is properly grounded in the provided reference source and relevant to the user query
- Automated reasoning – Prevention of factual errors from hallucinations using sound mathematical, logic-based algorithmic verification and reasoning processes to verify the information generated by a model, so outputs align with known facts and aren’t based on fabricated or inconsistent data
Policy-based enforcement of guardrails
Security teams often have organizational requirements to enforce the use of Amazon Bedrock Guardrails for every inference call to Amazon Bedrock. To support this requirement, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides the new IAM condition key bedrock:GuardrailIdentifier, which can be used in IAM policies to enforce the use of a specific guardrail for model inference. The condition key in the IAM policy can be applied to the following APIs:
The following diagram illustrates the policy-based enforcement workflow.
If the guardrail configured in your IAM policy doesn’t match the guardrail specified in the request, the request will be rejected with an access denied exception, enforcing compliance with organizational policies.
Policy examples
In this section, we present several policy examples demonstrating how to enforce guardrails for model inference.
Example 1: Enforce the use of a specific guardrail and its numeric version
The following example illustrates the enforcement of exampleguardrail and its numeric version 1 during model inference:
The added explicit deny denies the user request for calling the listed actions with other GuardrailIdentifier and GuardrailVersion values irrespective of other permissions the user might have.
Example 2: Enforce the use of a specific guardrail and its draft version
The following example illustrates the enforcement of exampleguardrail and its draft version during model inference:
Example 3: Enforce the use of a specific guardrail and its numeric versions
The following example illustrates the enforcement of exampleguardrail and its numeric versions during model inference:
Example 4: Enforce the use of a specific guardrail and its versions, including the draft
The following example illustrates the enforcement of exampleguardrail and its versions, including the draft, during model inference:
Example 5: Enforce the use of a specific guardrail and version pair from a list of guardrail and version pairs
The following example illustrates the enforcement of exampleguardrail1 and its version 1, or exampleguardrail2 and its version 2, or exampleguardrail3 and its version 3 and its draft during model inference:
Known limitations
When implementing policy-based guardrail enforcement, be aware of these limitations:
- At the time of this writing, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails doesn’t support resource-based policies for cross-account access.
- If a user assumes a role that has a specific guardrail configured using the
bedrock:GuardrailIdentifiercondition key, the user can strategically use input tags to help avoid having guardrail checks applied to certain parts of their prompt. Input tags allow users to mark specific sections of text that should be processed by guardrails, leaving other sections unprocessed. For example, a user could intentionally leave sensitive or potentially harmful content outside of the tagged sections, preventing those portions from being evaluated against the guardrail policies. However, regardless of how the prompt is structured or tagged, the guardrail will still be fully applied to the model’s response. - If a user has a role configured with a specific guardrail requirement (using the
bedrock:GuardrailIdentifiercondition), they shouldn’t use that same role to access services like Amazon Bedrock Knowledge BasesRetrieveAndGenerateor Amazon Bedrock AgentsInvokeAgent. These higher-level services work by making multipleInvokeModelcalls behind the scenes on the user’s behalf. Although some of these calls might include the required guardrail, others don’t. When the system attempts to make these guardrail-free calls using a role that requires guardrails, it results inAccessDeniederrors, breaking the functionality of these services. To help avoid this issue, organizations should separate permissions—using different roles for direct model access with guardrails versus access to these composite Amazon Bedrock services.
Conclusion
The new IAM policy-based guardrail enforcement in Amazon Bedrock represents a crucial advancement in AI governance as generative AI becomes integrated into business operations. By enabling centralized policy enforcement, security teams can maintain consistent safety controls across AI applications regardless of who develops or deploys them, effectively mitigating risks related to harmful content, privacy violations, and bias. This approach offers significant advantages: it scales efficiently as organizations expand their AI initiatives without creating administrative bottlenecks, helps prevent technical debt by standardizing safety implementations, and enhances the developer experience by allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than compliance mechanics.
This capability demonstrates organizational commitment to responsible AI practices through comprehensive monitoring and audit mechanisms. Organizations can use model invocation logging in Amazon Bedrock to capture complete request and response data in Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, including specific guardrail trace documentation showing when and how content was filtered. Combined with AWS CloudTrail integration that records guardrail configurations and policy enforcement actions, businesses can confidently scale their generative AI initiatives with appropriate safety mechanisms protecting their brand, customers, and data—striking the essential balance between innovation and ethical responsibility needed to build trust in AI systems.
Get started today with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails and implement configurable safeguards that balance innovation with responsible AI governance across your organization.
About the Authors
Shyam Srinivasan is on the Amazon Bedrock Guardrails product team. He cares about making the world a better place through technology and loves being part of this journey. In his spare time, Shyam likes to run long distances, travel around the world, and experience new cultures with family and friends.
Antonio Rodriguez is a Principal Generative AI Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He helps companies of all sizes solve their challenges, embrace innovation, and create new business opportunities with Amazon Bedrock. Apart from work, he loves to spend time with his family and play sports with his friends.
Satveer Khurpa is a Sr. WW Specialist Solutions Architect, Amazon Bedrock at Amazon Web Services. In this role, he uses his expertise in cloud-based architectures to develop innovative generative AI solutions for clients across diverse industries. Satveer’s deep understanding of generative AI technologies allows him to design scalable, secure, and responsible applications that unlock new business opportunities and drive tangible value.