google/magika

Magika is a novel AI-powered file type detection tool that relies on the recent advance of deep learning to provide accurate detection. Under the hood, Magika employs a custom, highly optimized model that only weighs about a few MBs, and enables precise file identification within milliseconds, even when running on a single CPU. Magika has been trained and evaluated on a dataset of ~100M samples across 200+ content types (covering both binary and textual file formats), and it achieves an average ~99% accuracy on our test set.

Here is an example of what Magika command line output looks like:

Magika is used at scale to help improve Google users' safety by routing Gmail, Drive, and Safe Browsing files to the proper security and content policy scanners, processing hundreds billions samples on a weekly basis. Magika has also been integrated with VirusTotal (example) and abuse.ch (example).

For more context you can read our initial announcement post on Google's OSS blog, you can consult Magika's website, and you can read more in our research paper, published at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2025.