AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is topical rails?
Topical rails (also called topic restriction): Guardrails that keep a conversation inside an approved subject area, steering the model to decline or redirect questions outside its scope. They stop a specialised assistant from drifting into unrelated or risky topics.
Topical rails: an example
An insurance bot recognises a question about stock tips as out of scope and replies that it can only help with policy matters.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- Toxicity classification
- Training data extraction
- TruthfulQA
- Unbounded consumption
- Vector and embedding weaknesses
- Verbosity bias
- Access control
- Adversarial example
Where you learn it
Topical rails is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.