Companies often face security and financial risks when adopting generative AI, including shadow AI usage, data leaks in prompts, and uncontrolled costs from autonomous agents. Standard L7 proxies like Nginx, Envoy, or Kong are insufficient for LLM traffic because they cannot analyze semantic content in real-time or manage token-based billing.
The AI Optimum platform serves as a dedicated AI gateway to centralize security and routing. It handles Server-Sent Events (SSE) to mask sensitive data like passport numbers or tax IDs across streaming chunks. The gateway also routes traffic between local GPU clusters and commercial APIs based on data sensitivity, rather than simple round-robin algorithms.
Unlike standard proxies that measure traffic in bytes, the AI gateway tracks usage in tokens, allowing for granular cost allocation by project or department. It supports hard and soft quotas to prevent budget overruns. The system is compatible with the OpenAI API contract, enabling integration by updating the base URL and authentication key.
The gateway introduces minimal latency, measured in tens of milliseconds, for processing and security checks. It utilizes an adaptive sliding microbuffer to inspect outgoing streams for sensitive information without degrading performance. Detailed profiling tools allow administrators to decompose request processing time, including security checks and model generation duration.
