A10 Networks has announced the general availability of its new AI Gateway, a centralized control plane designed to provide unified routing, cost management, and governance for enterprise AI applications, agents, and large language models (LLMs). The company states that the product addresses the challenges organizations face as AI adoption accelerates, particularly the lack of visibility and control over diverse AI models and applications being used across different teams.
According to A10 Networks, the AI Gateway aims to optimize performance, control expenditure, centralize observability, enforce security, and ensure reliable access to appropriate models for developers and users. The company's president and CEO, Dhrupad Trivedi, emphasized the need for enterprises to balance rapid AI deployment with maintaining control, citing concerns about escalating costs and the absence of a central point for policy enforcement.
The A10 AI Gateway is described as moving beyond earlier generations of AI gateways that primarily focused on centralizing access, simplifying API management, and metering requests. This new offering is designed to intelligently route each AI request to the most suitable model based on its specific needs, while also enabling granular management of access, usage, and costs at individual and team levels.
Key capabilities highlighted by A10 Networks include identity-based AI access, which allows organizations to apply access and routing policies based on user and group profiles, synchronized with existing directory systems. The system also features "smart routing," which evaluates the complexity and type of each request to direct simple tasks to more cost-efficient models and complex tasks to more capable ones.
For centralized traffic and cost management, the AI Gateway provides real-time, per-request cost tracking in dollars, along with per-model and per-team token budgets that can be set with hard limits and soft-limit alerts. It also enforces business-layer rate limiting (TPM/RPM) per key or team, offering centralized visibility into AI usage and governance.
A10 Networks states that the AI Gateway complements its existing AI security portfolio, which includes TrojAI and ThreatX solutions. This integrated approach is intended to secure AI across its full lifecycle, from pre-deployment testing to runtime defense and enforcement at the network and API layers.
The product is delivered as software or with integrated hardware, designed to run entirely within the customer's own environment, whether on-premises, in a private cloud, or air-gapped. This deployment flexibility is intended to ensure full data sovereignty and keep models, data, and policy under the organization's control, a feature A10 Networks suggests cloud-hosted and edge-bound gateways may not fully match.
