The go-to cheap, fast content moderation layer for production LLM pipelines.
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Coding
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Writing
20
Research
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Images
90
Value
55
Long Context
Use this when
Automated content safety screening and policy enforcement in LLM-powered applications
Skip this if
You need a model for general tasks like writing, coding, or reasoning — this is a safety classifier, not a conversational or generative AI.
Pricing
$0.18/1M in
$0.18/1M out
→0%since May 2026
Context
164k tokens
Speed
Very fast
Llama Guard 4 supports the MLCommons hazard taxonomy and is designed to be used as a shield model in multi-model architectures. Not suitable as a standalone AI assistant. Available via Meta's open model ecosystem and third-party API providers.
Purpose-built for content moderation with fine-tuned safety classification accuracy
Extremely affordable at $0.18/1M tokens, making high-volume content screening economically viable
163K context window allows screening of long conversations or documents in a single pass
Multimodal guard capabilities in v4 — can evaluate both text and image content for policy violations
Weaknesses
Not a general-purpose model — cannot be used for coding, writing, or reasoning tasks
Classification decisions may still produce false positives/negatives requiring human review pipelines
Narrower applicability than generalist safety layers built into Claude Sonnet 4.6 or GPT-5.4
Real-world use cases
What people actually use Llama Guard 4 12B for.
Screening user-submitted prompts before sending to a primary LLM to catch policy violations
Classifying LLM outputs in a customer service bot to prevent harmful or off-policy responses
Batch auditing historical conversation logs for safety compliance reporting
How Llama Guard 4 12B compares
The nearest models people weigh against it, and what actually separates them.
vs Llama 3.1 70B Instruct — Against Llama 3.1 70B Instruct (Meta), Llama Guard 4 12B runs about 55% cheaper per token, takes 1.3x the context and answers faster. Take Llama Guard 4 12B unless you specifically need what Llama 3.1 70B Instruct does better.
vs Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct — Against Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct (Meta), Llama Guard 4 12B runs about 48% cheaper per token, takes 1.3x the context and answers faster. Take Llama Guard 4 12B unless you specifically need what Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct does better.
vs Llama 4 Maverick — Against Llama 4 Maverick (Meta), Llama Guard 4 12B runs about 84% cheaper per token, gives up 1.6x on context and answers faster. Take Llama Guard 4 12B unless you specifically need what Llama 4 Maverick does better.
Price History
Llama Guard 4 12B pricing over time
→0% since May 31
90 data points · tracked daily since May 31, 2026
Ready to try it?
Start using Llama Guard 4 12B
Automated content safety screening and policy enforcement in LLM-powered applications. Start free — no card required.
Meta's Llama 3.1 70B Instruct is a open-weight large language model with 70 billion parameters, fine-tuned for instruction following across coding, reasoning, and general-purpose tasks. It offers a strong balance of capability and cost at $0.40/1M tokens for both input and output.
Verdict
The go-to budget open-weight model for teams who need solid LLM capability without frontier model pricing.
Quality score
65%
Pricing
$0.40/1M in
$0.40/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
131k tokens
Pricing shown is via third-party API providers (e.g., OpenRouter, Together AI) — costs may vary. Meta releases Llama 3.1 weights publicly, enabling self-hosting at even lower cost. Not available directly from Meta as a hosted API.
Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct is Meta's open-weight multimodal model capable of understanding both text and images at an extremely low price point. It handles image captioning, visual question answering, and document analysis alongside standard text tasks.
Verdict
The go-to vision model when budget is the top constraint and good-enough accuracy is acceptable.
Quality score
57%
Pricing
$0.34/1M in
$0.34/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
131k tokens
Available via multiple inference providers including Together AI, Fireworks, and OpenRouter. As an open-weight model, it can also be self-hosted for even lower marginal costs at scale. Part of Meta's Llama 3.2 family which also includes a 90B vision variant for heavier workloads.
Open-weightVisionBudgetMultimodalMeta
Best for
Budget-conscious developers who need basic vision capabilities without paying premium multimodal prices.
Llama Guard 4 12B costs $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.18 per million output tokens on the API. A month of 10M input and 2M output tokens runs about $2.16 at list price, before any batch or caching discounts.
What is Llama Guard 4 12B best for?
Llama Guard 4 12B is best for automated content safety screening and policy enforcement in llm-powered applications. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and very fast speed.
When should I avoid Llama Guard 4 12B?
You need a model for general tasks like writing, coding, or reasoning — this is a safety classifier, not a conversational or generative AI.
What is a cheaper alternative to Llama Guard 4 12B?
GPT-5.6 Terra (OpenAI) at $2.00/1M/1M input against Llama Guard 4 12B's $0.18/1M/1M. Best OpenAI value — near-flagship capability at 60% off. Compare it first if Llama Guard 4 12B's pricing is the thing stopping you.
What is a faster alternative to Llama Guard 4 12B?
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct — fast against Llama Guard 4 12B's very fast, with 131k tokens of context. Worth the swap when response time is what your users notice rather than the last few points of reasoning depth.
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