The product
AI Gateway sits between every application calling a model and the models themselves. It routes traffic across providers - OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, self-hosted - by cost, latency, and policy. It enforces per-team spend caps. It logs every call with tokens in, tokens out, and the policy applied. When procurement asks where the AI budget went, Gateway tells them. When a provider quietly deprecates a model, Gateway swaps without a code change. It is the control plane you wish you had put in front of the pilot before it grew into four production systems.
Why Defense is different
Defense environments are air-gapped, FedRAMP High, or DOD IL5+. Agents run inside controlled networks where data does not cross the boundary to a commercial provider, ever. FISMA and CMMC 2.0 dictate the evidence standard. Every interaction is logged, every access control is attribute-based, every deployment passes through an ATO that takes months and assumes nothing. Agents authorized to read a classified document are forbidden from synthesizing its contents into an unclassified channel. AI Act and NIST AI RMF compliance are not aspirations, they are acquisition requirements on the SOW. The contracting officer does not care about a flashy demo. They care whether the system will pass the next Authority to Operate review, and whether the vendor will still be around to support it through the contract lifecycle.
How Gateway plugs into defense reality
For defense, AI Gateway runs inside the enclave. No outbound traffic to commercial providers. All routing decisions happen against a catalog of self-hosted models running on accredited hardware. Gateway is the ATO-boundary artifact that auditors trace every AI interaction through. Attribute-based access control gates which users can call which models, the policy travels with the session, not the application code.
From proof-of-concept to production
Most defense AI projects die between the pilot demo and the first regulatory review. The demo proves the model can do the task, the review asks whether the system will do it the same way a year from now, whether the audit trail survives a schema change, and whether the vendor will be around to sign the control attestation.
Gateway answers those questions by design. Policies are versioned in source control, not hidden in prompts. Audit trails are first-class artifacts, not log scraps. Governance is a platform feature, not a tab in a spreadsheet. When your defense compliance team meets the system for the first time, they see what they already recognize: a register entry, a validation doc, and a violations feed they can query.
Next step
The fastest way to know whether Gateway fits your defense stack is a 90-minute architecture review. You bring the architecture and the three hardest questions. We bring the deployment patterns we have seen work. The output is a written findings doc - not slides - that your team can use whether or not you end up working with us.
Next step
Map Gateway against your stack in 90 minutes.