NEW! Data443 Acquires Vaikora – Real-Time AI Runtime Control & Enforcement for AI Agent
An AI gateway is software that sits between AI applications and LLM provider APIs to handle routing, fallback, caching, observability, and policy. The category emerged in 2023 to solve the problem of applications that needed to call multiple LLM providers without duplicating client code. By 2026, the category includes pure routing gateways, observability-first gateways, and security-first gateways like Vaikora.
Most enterprises now use more than one LLM provider. A typical mix includes a frontier model for complex tasks, a cheaper model for high-volume tasks, and an open-source model for cost-sensitive or compliance-sensitive workloads. Direct integration with each provider creates duplicated logic across services, makes provider switching expensive, and scatters observability data. Gateways solve those problems by presenting a single API surface and centralizing cross-cutting concerns.
Security-first gateways add policy and audit to the cross-cutting concerns. The same proxy that handles routing and caching can also enforce content policy, scan for PII, and sign each request into an audit chain. Vaikora positions itself in this second category.
AI gateways are sometimes called LLM proxies, LLM routers, or AI proxies. They overlap with AI runtime control when the gateway adds policy enforcement. Pure routing gateways include LiteLLM, Portkey, and Kong AI Gateway. Vaikora sits in front of or alongside these gateways for security-sensitive workloads.
An e-commerce company uses LiteLLM to route most LLM traffic to a cheap fast model, with fallback to a frontier model when the cheap model returns low-confidence answers. A second example: a healthcare AI vendor deploys Vaikora as the policy-enforcing gateway in front of OpenAI, with HIPAA-aligned content filtering on every request and a SHA-256 audit chain that satisfies the BAA evidence requirements.
If you use more than one LLM provider, or if you need centralized policy and audit, then yes. If you have a single provider and minimal compliance requirements, direct integration may be enough until the application grows.
API gateways are designed for general-purpose REST traffic. AI gateways understand LLM-specific concepts: prompt structure, token costs, model versions, streaming responses, and tool calls. The two categories are converging but most AI gateways still ship with LLM-specific features that general API gateways do not.
Vaikora is the security-first AI gateway. It does the routing and proxying that the pure routing gateways do, and adds deterministic policy enforcement, a SHA-256 audit chain, and pre-built compliance presets. It can also deploy alongside an existing routing gateway as a security layer in front.
An AI firewall is one role an AI gateway can play. Pure firewalls focus on input/output filtering. Vaikora and similar security gateways extend the firewall role with action-side policy, audit, and compliance evidence.
Last updated: 2026-05-20.
