Red Hat Acquires Chatterbox Labs to Secure Enterprise AI and Hybrid Cloud Workloads

Red Hat announced the strategic acquisition of Chatterbox Labs, a leader in model-agnostic AI safety, on December 16, 2025. This move brings essential "security for AI" capabilities to the hybrid cloud platform, helping organizations move from pilots to production. The integration provides the metrics needed for leaders to approve large-scale AI deployments with confidence.

Advancing AI Safety and Transparency

The acquisition centers on Chatterbox Labs’ AIMI technology, which delivers independent risk metrics for Large Language Models. These tools allow developers to pinpoint and remedy insecure or biased prompts before they reach the end user. By validating fairness and explainability, Red Hat makes safety a default feature in modern machine learning operations. This integration aligns with the recently launched Red Hat AI 3 and supports diverse models. Whether running on-premise or in public clouds, customers can apply consistent safety testing to their applications. This flexibility is a key differentiator against proprietary safety tools from cloud competitors.

Securing the Future of Agentic AI

A major focus of the deal is agentic AI, where autonomous agents perform complex tasks within core systems. Chatterbox Labs has pioneered research into securing these agents by monitoring triggers within the Model Context Protocol. This ensures that even as AI becomes more autonomous, its actions remain within safe and demonstrable boundaries.

"Innovative, model-agnostic safety testing and guardrail technology is the critical security for AI layer that the industry needs," noted Steven Huels, vice president of AI Engineering at Red Hat.

Stuart Battersby, co-founder of Chatterbox Labs, emphasized that AI guardrails must be rigorously tested rather than hidden in proprietary boxes. They aim to bring these validated standards to the open source community to prevent lock-in. This acquisition effectively addresses the "Trust Gap" that has stalled AI adoption for risk-averse enterprises. By providing automated testing and real-time remediation, Red Hat is positioning itself as the foundation for the next generation of intelligent workloads. Developers can expect new safety tools within Red Hat OpenShift AI shortly.