AI Guardrails Need SRE Thinking, Not Content Moderation

Most production AI teams use input/output classifiers as safety layers, but real failures come from distributed-systems issues like retry loops amplifying bad state and cascading errors across agent steps. Guardrail classifiers are probabilistic sensors with error rates that compound, not binary gates. The article argues that AI safety should borrow from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) rather than trust-and-safety approaches.