**Red Hat Acquires AI Security Startup Chatterbox Labs**

IBM Corp.'s Red Hat unit has made a strategic move to bolster its artificial intelligence (AI) security capabilities by acquiring London-based startup Chatterbox Labs Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition, announced on December 16, 2025, marks the latest step in Red Hat's efforts to adapt its core products to run AI workloads. Over the past two years, the company has developed several AI-optimized products, including a version of its flagship Linux distribution that comes preinstalled with machine learning libraries and OpenShift AI, which supports an open-source tool called llm-d for distributing inference workloads across multiple servers.

Chatterbox Labs, founded in 2011, has flown under the radar until now. Despite raising less than $1 million from investors since its inception, the company has developed a platform called AIMI (Artificial Intelligence Model Integrity) that protects AI models against risks such as hacking attempts, data poisoning, and toxic output.

AIMI uses an automated red teaming mechanism to launch simulated cyberattacks against AI models and identify potential weak points. The platform also visualizes the results in a dashboard to ease analysis. One of its key features is the ability to measure an AI model's susceptibility to prompt injections, a type of cyberattack that attempts to trick the model into performing unauthorized actions.

Chatterbox Labs' software can detect other risks as well, including data leaks that might reveal sensitive information about the model's architecture and user prompts that breach privacy regulations. The platform supports both large language models and less advanced neural networks such as computer vision models.

Red Hat plans to integrate AIMI into its existing AI-optimized products, which include its IBM unit's AI-optimized Linux distribution, OpenShift AI, and Inference Server. A few weeks ago, Red Hat released a new version of the suite that introduced support for Multi-Cloud Persistence (MCP), a technology that enables AI agents to perform actions in third-party applications.

The acquisition will enable Red Hat customers to secure their MCP-powered agents using AIMI. In the longer term, Red Hat plans to make AIMI available under an open-source license, further expanding its capabilities and appeal to the developer community.

"This acquisition is a strategic move by Red Hat to strengthen its AI security capabilities and provide customers with robust protection for their AI models," said John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE. "We're excited to see how AIMI will integrate into Red Hat's existing products and enable customers to build more secure and reliable AI systems."

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RED HAT ACQUIRES AI SECURITY STARTUP CHATTERBOX LABS