inspect-ai

Welcome to Inspect, a framework for large language model evaluations created by the UK AI Security Institute.

Inspect provides many built-in components, including facilities for prompt engineering, tool usage, multi-turn dialog, and model graded evaluations. Extensions to Inspect (e.g. to support new elicitation and scoring techniques) can be provided by other Python packages.

To get started with Inspect, please see the documentation at https://inspect.aisi.org.uk/.

Inspect also includes a collection of over 200 pre-built evaluations ready to run on any model (learn more at https://inspect.aisi.org.uk/evals/).

To work on development of Inspect, clone the repository and install with the -e flag and [dev] optional dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/inspect_ai.git
cd inspect_ai
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Optionally install pre-commit hooks via

make hooks

Run linting, formatting, and tests via

make check
make test

If you use VS Code, you should be sure to have installed the recommended extensions (Python, Ruff, and MyPy). Note that you'll be prompted to install these when you open the project in VS Code.

Frontend development (TypeScript)

The web UI lives in a git submodule at src/inspect_ai/_view/ts-mono/. These steps are only needed if you plan to work on the TypeScript/React frontend — Python-only contributors can skip this entirely.

Initialize the submodule and install dependencies — see the one-time setup guide.

Documentation

To work on the Inspect documentation, install the optional [doc] dependencies with the -e flag and build the docs:

pip install -e ".[doc]"
cd docs
quarto render # or 'quarto preview'

If you intend to work on the docs iteratively, you'll want to install the Quarto extension in VS Code.