Model reference · open weights
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.
About
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
| Maker | ibm-granite |
|---|---|
| Type | Language models |
| Parameters (lead) | 8.4B |
| Context | 128k tokens |
| Variants | 1 |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Based on | ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b |
| Released | 2026-04-16 |
| Popularity | 68k downloads / month |
| Likes | 37 |
| Licence | Open weights |
How it works
Variants
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.
| Variant | Params | Precision | VRAM | Fits 16 GB | Weights |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| granite-guardian-4.1-8b | 8.4B | BF16 | ~19.3 GB | ✓ | Weights ↗ |
Using it via the API
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"}]}'
Licence
Open weights under apache-2.0 — commercial use is permitted. Deploy it on AxForge EU hardware on request. Read the licence ↗