API Gateway (AI)

An AI API gateway is a proxy layer that sits between internal applications and external AI model APIs, enforcing rate limits, cost controls, authentication, PII redaction, audit logging, and fallback routing across multiple model providers. It is the standard enterprise pattern for managing AI API calls at scale.

Purpose-built AI gateways such as Portkey, LiteLLM, and Azure AI Gateway provide observability, cost attribution per team or product, and model-switching without code changes. A well-configured gateway can reduce AI API spend by 30–50% through caching and routing to cheaper models for simpler tasks.