n8n's Guardrails node masks your PII. It doesn't give it back. Here's why that matters.

n8n shipped a native Guardrails node back in November. PII detection, jailbreak protection, content filtering — all built into the platform, zero external services. It's a genuinely good default, and if you're building AI workflows in n8n and not using it yet, you should be. But we kept hitting the same wall with it, and once you see the wall, you can't unsee it. The wall Here's a workflow almost everyone building support automation eventually writes: [Webhook: support ticket] → [Guardrails: Sanitize Text] → [LLM: summarize] → [write summary to CRM] A ticket comes in: "Hi, I'm Sarah Chen, my account email is [email protected], and I was charged twice for my subscription." Guardrails' Sanitize Text mode catches the PII before it hits the LLM: "Hi, I'm [NAME], my account email is [EMAIL], and I was charged twice for my subscription." Good. The LLM never sees Sarah's real email. It summariz