Google has open sourced Magika, its AI-powered file-type identification system.

Magika “leverages the power of deep learning” to help accurately detect binary and textual file types. “Under the hood, Magika employs a custom, highly optimized deep-learning model, enabling precise file identification within milliseconds, even when running on a CPU,” the announcement states.

Accurately detecting file types is crucial for determining how to process files, the announcement notes, and tools such as libmagic and the file utility have been the standard for more than 50 years. Magika, however, “outperforms traditional tools with 99%+ average precision and recall,” the website says.

The Magika code and model are freely available on GitHub under the Apache2 License. You can try out Magika through the web demo or install it as a Python library and standalone command-line tool using the command: pip install magika