Goodfire says its new ‘inside-out’ monitors catch rogue AI agents at a fraction of the cost

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The standard way to keep an AI agent in line is to have a second AI read over its shoulder. It’s been the default approach, but it can get expensive fast when agents run for hours and process the equivalent of several novels’ worth of text.

Goodfire, a startup focused on interpretability (figuring out how AI models work internally), launched a cheaper option on Thursday: monitors that watch what’s happening inside an AI model as it works, rather than just reading what it writes. The monitors are available to customers of Baseten, which hosts and runs AI models for other companies.

Baseten’s Base Labs announced a safety partnership with Goodfire and the AI platform Hugging Face last month.

The launch comes after a string of incidents this year in which AI agents escaped their test environments, including OpenAI agents that breached Hugging Face. Kimi K3, the open model Goodfire built its first monitor around, took advantage of a leak in its sandbox to access the internet and information on GitHub this summer.

Goodfire’s system works a bit like airport security. Small detectors called probes read the model’s internal signals at every step of an agent’s work, the way a walk-through scanner checks every passenger. Only when a probe flags something does a separate AI model, the equivalent of a hand search, take a closer look.