Compare the top five LLM gateways for securing your AI apps, evaluated on guardrails, access governance, and compliance. Bifrost is the best choice for enterprises running mission-critical AI workloads that require best-in-class performance, scalability, and reliability.
Every prompt and response in a production AI application passes through external model providers, which exposes API keys, credentials, and regulated data at the point of each request. The OWASP Foundation ranks prompt injection and sensitive information disclosure as the two most critical risks for LLM applications, and both are best contained at a shared control point rather than inside every service. An LLM gateway is that control point: a single proxy that authenticates, routes, filters, and audits traffic to multiple model providers. This guide compares five LLM gateways for securing your AI apps, starting with Bifrost, the open-source AI gateway from Maxim AI, and evaluates each on guardrails, access governance, deployment isolation, and compliance.
What Is an LLM Gateway, and How Does It Improve Security?
An LLM gateway is a unified entry point that authenticates, routes, observes, and governs traffic to multiple LLM providers through a single API. For security, it centralizes controls that would otherwise be rebuilt in every application: input and output filtering, credential handling, access policies, and audit logging across all providers and models at once.
