Model reference · open weights

granite-guardian-4.1

granite-guardian-4.1 is an open-weight language model from ibm-granite, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.

LLMs ibm-granite 1 variants 68k downloads/mo
Request this model on EU hardware All served models Not on the shared API today — deployed on request.

About

What granite-guardian-4.1 is

Granite Guardian 4.1 8B What's New Granite Guardian 4.1 8B introduces improved Bring Your Own Criteria (BYOC) support, enabling users to define arbitrary judging criteria beyond the pre-baked safety and hallucination detectors. The model can now faithfully evaluate complex, multi-part requirements such as formatting rules, length constraints, and domain-specific instructions. Key improvements over Granite Guardian 3.3: - BYOC capability: Large gains on instruction-following benchmarks. For example, IFEval multi-constraint BAcc improves from 0.458 to 0.844 (no-think), InfoBench (Human) from 0.535 to 0.706, InfoBench (GPT-4) from 0.585 to 0.726. - Best-of-N reward model: When used as a reward model for best-of-N selection on the verifiable tasks in the JETTS benchmark, Granite Guardian 4.1 8B achieves an overall score of 70.29, outperforming all tested reward models up to 70B parameters. - Hybrid thinking: Supports both thinking mode (with detailed reasoning traces) and non-thinking mode (low-latency yes/no judgements). - Function calling: Stronger hallucination detection in agentic workflows: BAcc improves from 0.74 to 0.79 (no-think). - Maintained safety and groundedness: Competitive with prior releases on OOD safety (F1 0.79 no-think) and RAG groundedness (Avg BAcc 0.76 think). Model Summary Granite Guardian 4.1 8B is a specialized safety model fine-tuned from ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b, designed to judge if the input prompts and the output responses of an LLM-based system meet specified criteria. The model comes pre-baked with certain criteria including but not limited to: jailbreak attempts, profanity, and hallucinations related to tool calls and retrieval augmented generation in agent-based systems. Additionally, the model also allows users to bring their own criteria and tailor the judging behavior to specific use cases. This version of Granite Guardian is a hybrid thinking model that allows the user to operate in thinking or non-thinking mode. In thinking mode, the model produces detailed reasoning traces through <think ... </think and <score ... </score tags. In non-thinking mode, the model only produces the judgement score through the <score ... </score

Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.

Specifications

What it is

Makeribm-granite
TypeLanguage models
Parameters (lead)8.4B
Context128k tokens
Variants1
Runs withtransformers
Based onibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b
Released2026-04-16
Popularity68k downloads / month
Likes37
LicenceOpen weights

How it works

How language models work

Your prompttext / messagesTransformerattention over tokensNext-token loopgenerate + streamResponsetext · tool callsA language model reads your tokens and predicts the next one, again and again, streaming the reply back.

Variants

Sizes & precisions

Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.

VariantParamsPrecisionVRAMFits 16 GBWeights
granite-guardian-4.1-8b8.4BBF16~19.3 GBWeights ↗

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys granite-guardian-4-1 for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (granite-guardian-4-1 below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"granite-guardian-4-1","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Details

Languages, data & research

Languages

en

Tags

transformers safetensors granite text-generation guardian safety hallucination conversational en endpoints_compatible deploy:azure

Papers

Licence

Open weights

Open weights under apache-2.0 — commercial use is permitted. Deploy it on AxForge EU hardware on request. Read the licence ↗

Sources

Weights & code

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