Inspect AI
The rigorous one, from the UK AI Safety Institute.
93
sovereigntyInspect is the evaluation framework built by the UK AI Safety Institute for evaluating frontier models, released MIT. It is the most methodologically serious option here: first-class support for multi-turn agent evaluations, tool use, sandboxed execution and human grading, with a design that takes statistical validity seriously rather than producing a number that feels reassuring. If your evaluations need to withstand scrutiny — regulatory, academic or internal — this is the one.
OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseMIT
PricingFree, MIT, publicly funded.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +Built for evaluations that have to survive real scrutiny
- +Strong agent, tool-use and sandboxed-execution support
- +Excellent log viewer for inspecting individual samples
- +MIT, from a public institute with no commercial upsell
Where it falls short
- −Aimed at model evaluation more than application regression testing
- −Steeper learning curve than Promptfoo for simple cases
- −Less oriented toward CI gating out of the box
Inspect AI as an alternative to
Where Inspect AI shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Inspect AI head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.