Safety settings

The Gemini API provides safety settings that you can adjust during the prototyping stage to determine if your application requires more or less restrictive safety configuration. You can adjust these settings across five filter categories to restrict or allow certain types of content.

This guide covers how the Gemini API handles safety settings and filtering and how you can change the safety settings for your application.

Note: Applications that use less restrictive safety settings may be subject to review. See the Terms of Service for more information.

Safety filters

The Gemini API's adjustable safety filters cover the following categories:

Category	Description
Harassment	Negative or harmful comments targeting identity and/or protected attributes.
Hate speech	Content that is rude, disrespectful, or profane.
Sexually explicit	Contains references to sexual acts or other lewd content.
Dangerous	Promotes, facilitates, or encourages harmful acts.
Civic integrity	Election-related queries.

These categories are defined in HarmCategory. The Gemini models only support HARM_CATEGORY_HARASSMENT, HARM_CATEGORY_HATE_SPEECH, HARM_CATEGORY_SEXUALLY_EXPLICIT, HARM_CATEGORY_DANGEROUS_CONTENT, and HARM_CATEGORY_CIVIC_INTEGRITY. All other categories are used only by PaLM 2 (Legacy) models.

You can use these filters to adjust what's appropriate for your use case. For example, if you're building video game dialogue, you may deem it acceptable to allow more content that's rated as Dangerous due to the nature of the game.

In addition to the adjustable safety filters, the Gemini API has built-in protections against core harms, such as content that endangers child safety. These types of harm are always blocked and cannot be adjusted.

Content safety filtering level

The Gemini API categorizes the probability level of content being unsafe as HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW, or NEGLIGIBLE.

The Gemini API blocks content based on the probability of content being unsafe and not the severity. This is important to consider because some content can have low probability of being unsafe even though the severity of harm could still be high. For example, comparing the sentences:

The robot punched me.

The robot slashed me up.

The first sentence might result in a higher probability of being unsafe, but you might consider the second sentence to be a higher severity in terms of violence. Given this, it is important that you carefully test and consider what the appropriate level of blocking is needed to support your key use cases while minimizing harm to end users.

Safety filtering per request

You can adjust the safety settings for each request you make to the API. When you make a request, the content is analyzed and assigned a safety rating. The safety rating includes the category and the probability of the harm classification. For example, if the content was blocked due to the harassment category having a high probability, the safety rating returned would have category equal to HARASSMENT and harm probability set to HIGH.

By default, safety settings block content (including prompts) with medium or higher probability of being unsafe across any filter. This baseline safety is designed to work for most use cases, so you should only adjust your safety settings if it's consistently required for your application.

The following table describes the block settings you can adjust for each category. For example, if you set the block setting to Block few for the Hate speech category, everything that has a high probability of being hate speech content is blocked. But anything with a lower probability is allowed.

Threshold (Google AI Studio)	Threshold (API)	Description
Block none	`BLOCK_NONE`	Always show regardless of probability of unsafe content
Block few	`BLOCK_ONLY_HIGH`	Block when high probability of unsafe content
Block some	`BLOCK_MEDIUM_AND_ABOVE`	Block when medium or high probability of unsafe content
Block most	`BLOCK_LOW_AND_ABOVE`	Block when low, medium or high probability of unsafe content
N/A	`HARM_BLOCK_THRESHOLD_UNSPECIFIED`	Threshold is unspecified, block using default threshold

If the threshold is not set, the default block threshold is Block none (for gemini-1.5-pro-002 and gemini-1.5-flash-002 and all newer stable GA models) or Block some (in all other models) for all categories except the Civic integrity category.

The default block threshold for the Civic integrity category is Block none (for gemini-2.0-flash-001 aliased as gemini-2.0-flash, gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05, and gemini-2.0-flash-lite) both for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, and Block most for all other models in Google AI Studio only.

You can set these settings for each request you make to the generative service. See the HarmBlockThreshold API reference for details.

Safety feedback

generateContent returns a GenerateContentResponse which includes safety feedback.

Prompt feedback is included in promptFeedback. If promptFeedback.blockReason is set, then the content of the prompt was blocked.

Response candidate feedback is included in Candidate.finishReason and Candidate.safetyRatings. If response content was blocked and the finishReason was SAFETY, you can inspect safetyRatings for more details. The content that was blocked is not returned.

Adjust safety settings

This section covers how to adjust the safety settings in both Google AI Studio and in your code.

Google AI Studio

You can adjust safety settings in Google AI Studio, but you cannot turn them off.

Click Edit safety settings in the Run settings panel to open the Run safety settings modal. In the modal, you can use the sliders to adjust the content filtering level per safety category:

Note: If you set any of the category filters to Block none, Google AI Studio will display a reminder about the Gemini API's Terms of Service with respect to safety settings.

When you send a request (for example, by asking the model a question), a warning No Content message appears if the request's content is blocked. To see more details, hold the pointer over the No Content text and click warning Safety.

Gemini API SDKs

The following code snippet shows how to set safety settings in your GenerateContent call. This sets the thresholds for the harassment (HARM_CATEGORY_HARASSMENT) and hate speech (HARM_CATEGORY_HATE_SPEECH) categories. For example, setting these categories to BLOCK_LOW_AND_ABOVE blocks any content that has a low or higher probability of being harassment or hate speech. To understand the threshold settings, see Safety filtering per request.

Python Go JavaScript Dart (Flutter)Kotlin Java REST

    echo '{
    "safetySettings": [
        {"category": "HARM_CATEGORY_HARASSMENT", "threshold": "BLOCK_ONLY_HIGH"},
        {"category": "HARM_CATEGORY_HATE_SPEECH", "threshold": "BLOCK_MEDIUM_AND_ABOVE"}
    ],
    "contents": [{
        "parts":[{
            "text": "'I support Martians Soccer Club and I think Jupiterians Football Club sucks! Write a ironic phrase about them.'"}]}]}' > request.json

curl "https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-2.0-flash:generateContent?key=$GEMINI_API_KEY" \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -X POST \
    -d @request.json 2> /dev/nullsafety_settings.sh

Next steps

See the API reference to learn more about the full API.

Review the safety guidance for a general look at safety considerations when developing with LLMs.

Learn more about assessing probability versus severity from the Jigsaw team

Learn more about the products that contribute to safety solutions like the Perspective API. * You can use these safety settings to create a toxicity classifier. See the classification example to get started.

Safety filters#

Content safety filtering level#

Safety filtering per request#

Safety feedback#

Adjust safety settings#

Google AI Studio#

Gemini API SDKs#

Next steps#