The Guardrail Paradox: Why Perfect LLM Security Gets Turned Off

LLM guardrails sit on the critical path of every request, making latency as important as detection accuracy. A guardrail that catches 95% of attacks in 10ms proves more valuable than one catching 99% in 400ms, because the slow version gets disabled during incidents. For production deployments, the real metric isn't perfect security—it's security fast enough to actually run.