The cheapest incident is the one that stops itself
3 arguments for putting a control point in front of your AI traffic: what it stops you spending, what it saves you assembling, and what it stops you explaining afterwards.
What a runaway agent costs before anyone notices
An agent stuck in a retry loop bills at machine speed. Without a hard cap, the first signal is usually the invoice. Set your own assumptions below and compare the two outcomes.
Your numbers, your assumptions. This is arithmetic on the values above, not a benchmark or a claim about your workload. What the gateway actually does is enforce the cap: monthly USD limits per team or per API key, a configurable warning threshold, and a choice between warning and hard-blocking when the limit is reached.
1 control point instead of five integrations
Each of these is a separate product or a separate build in most stacks. Here they share 1 policy engine, 1 audit trail, 1 identity model, and 1 dashboard.
| What you need | Usually | Here |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt-injection and jailbreak filtering | A guardrails vendor, per-request pricing | Built in, plus fan-out to five providers if you want them |
| Token accounting and budget enforcement | An LLM gateway or a spreadsheet after the fact | Per team and per key, enforced at the proxy |
| PII and secret redaction | A DLP product or a home-grown middleware | Masked outbound, restored inbound |
| LLM tracing and metrics | A separate observability integration | Langfuse, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger |
| MCP and agent authorization | Custom code per client | OAuth 2.1 with DCR, plus cryptographic agent identity |
| Inventory of what AI you actually run | A spreadsheet, usually stale | Discovered in-band from live traffic |
| Audit evidence for a framework | Log shipping plus a query you write yourself | Structured audit events, browsable and exportable |
Mapped to the framework you report against
The OWASP LLM Top 10 for 2025, and the control in the gateway that addresses each item. Guardrails evaluation scores your deployment against this list directly.
| OWASP item | Control in the gateway |
|---|---|
| LLM01 Prompt injection | Policy engine patterns, guardrail provider fan-out, and system-prompt injection of behavioural rules |
| LLM02 Sensitive information disclosure | Outbound PII and secret redaction with round-trip unmasking, plus canary token leak detection |
| LLM03 Supply chain | MCP tool and A2A AgentCard rug-pull detection, the Skill Security Hub, and content-addressable approval |
| LLM04 Data and model poisoning | Shadow-AI inventory with quarantine and deny enforcement at the proxy |
| LLM05 Improper output handling | Response scanning and dedicated evaluation cases for markdown exfiltration, XSS, and SQL strings |
| LLM06 Excessive agency | Fail-closed MCP tool permissions, 3-tier hierarchy, per-tool rate limits, and agent autonomy floors |
| LLM07 System prompt leakage | System prompt governance with audit logging, and extraction test cases in the evaluation corpus |
| LLM08 Vector and embedding weaknesses | Evaluation cases for indirect injection via retrieved documents and cross-context leakage |
| LLM09 Misinformation | Content moderation policy packs and a dedicated misinformation evaluation category |
| LLM10 Unbounded consumption | Budget limits with HTTP 402 enforcement, per-user and per-tool sliding-window rate limits, and circuit breakers |
Put the cap in place before you need it
Budgets, redaction, and tool permissions are all opt-in. Turn on the ones you need and leave the rest alone.