Guardrail Studio: Create a Guardrail

Start a new guardrail from + in the sidebar, from the options on the welcome screen, or from the Templates button. There are five ways in: Guided Setup, a template, a blank guardrail, or uploading or pasting JSON.

Guided Setup

Guided Setup opens Create Guardrail (How would you like to create your guardrail?) with two options: Natural Language and Step-by-step.

Natural Language

Describe what you want in plain English.

Enter a Guardrail Name.
Describe your guardrail. For example: "I need a guardrail for a healthcare chatbot that blocks medical advice, PII disclosure, and allows appointment scheduling and FAQ queries…" The Tips box suggests mentioning your industry, what should be blocked, what should be allowed, and whether it's for internal or external users.
Click Generate. The Studio drafts the rules and shows {n} rules generated.
Click Apply & Create. The guardrail is created and saved, and you see Guardrail created and saved!

Step-by-step

Configure the guardrail in three steps:

Step	What you enter
Step 1/3: Guardrail Name	The name.
Step 2/3: Context	Industry (required): Healthcare, Finance & Banking, Retail & E-commerce, Travel & Hospitality, Legal & Compliance, Technology, Human Resources, Education, or General. Target LLMs: the kind of AI tools your users work with, such as a copilot, a chatbot, other assistants, or a custom LLM. Typical Usage: how people use those tools day to day. This helps generate rules tailored to your use case.
Step 3/3: Rules	Pick an Action Type (Allow, Block, Warn or Route), describe the rule, and add it. In Freeform mode the description becomes one rule entry. In Labels mode, comma-separated items ("Violence, PII disclosure, Medical advice") become separate entries. Add at least one.

Then choose:

Create builds the guardrail directly from your entries, one rule per action you used.
Create and Refine sends your entries to AI generation for fuller rules and definitions. Then click Apply & Create.

Either way, the guardrail is saved automatically.

From a template

The Guardrail Templates library holds pre-built guardrails organized by industry. Search by name, filter by industry, or filter by WitnessAI (official) and Custom (saved by your team). Select a template to preview its Context and rules, or its JSON.

Create new adds the template as a new guardrail.
Add to guardrail adds the template's rules to the guardrail you have open. Rules whose names already exist are skipped, and the Context is filled in only if yours is empty.

Built-in templates

Template	Industry	Rules / intentions
Airline Customer Service	Travel & Hospitality	2 / 8
Airline Employee Operations	Travel & Hospitality	3 / 9
Farm & Ranch Supply Chatbot	Retail & E-commerce	2 / 8
Healthcare Chatbot	Healthcare	2 / 8
HIPAA/PHI Protection	Healthcare	3 / 8
Finance Advisory Chatbot	Finance & Banking	2 / 8
Investment Banking Compliance	Finance & Banking	3 / 9
Insurance Employee Governance	Finance & Banking	3 / 9
Legal Document Analyzer	Legal & Compliance	2 / 8
Developer Code Governance	Technology	3 / 8
Organizational Behavior	Human Resources	3 / 8
LLM Sabotage Protection	General	2 / 7

Some templates set the built-in protections differently from a new guardrail. For example, some check prompts only, not replies. See

Guardrail Studio.

Blank guardrail

Blank Guardrail creates My New Guardrail with the name ready to edit, an empty Context and no rules. From the empty Rules card you can:

Create it for Me: generate rules from your Context.
Manually Add Rule.
Use template.

Upload or paste JSON

Import a guardrail you exported earlier, or one shared with you. For the accepted formats and how the two import routes differ, see

Guardrail Studio: Save, Share & Export.

Note: Only Guided Setup saves a new guardrail for you. A guardrail created from a template, a blank guardrail, or an import isn't kept until you use Save as Template. See

Guardrail Studio: Save, Share & Export.

Guardrail Studio: Create a Guardrail Guided Setup Natural Language Step-by-step From a template Built-in templates Blank guardrail Upload or paste JSON