What Is an AI Gateway? Complete Guide 2026

An AI gateway is a specialized reverse proxy that sits between AI applications and LLM providers, centralizing request routing, security inspection, policy enforcement, cost tracking, observability, rate limiting, and access control. Unlike conventional API gateways, which treat payloads as opaque, AI gateways can analyze prompt and response content to identify prompt injections, detect or redact personally identifiable information, prevent policy violations, and maintain detailed interaction logs. The text argues that such gateways help enterprises address growing risks from production AI deployments, including unclear data flows, uncontrolled spending, insufficient auditability, and emerging regulatory obligations such as the EU AI Act. It presents intelligent model routing, runtime security, token-level observability, budget controls, rate limiting, and authentication as the core functions, while positioning NeuralTrust’s open-source TrustGate as an enterprise-focused option with self-hosting, split control- and data-plane architecture, data sovereignty, agent support, and sub-100-millisecond inline latency.

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