Cohere API Gateway Patterns: Governing Chat, Embed, and Rerank Traffic
Cohere exposes three distinct request shapes: v2 chat generation with the Command models, v2 embed, and v2 rerank, each a separate route with a different data-exposure profile. Routing Cohere traffic through a policy gateway lets a platform bind every call to a natural-person identity, apply per-route policy, constrain egress to the Cohere host, and record each decision. This walks the gateway patterns for the three endpoints, including the private-deployment case.
Cohere's API splits into three request shapes that a platform tends to treat as one integration and should not. The v2 chat endpoint runs generation against the Command family. The v2 embed endpoint turns text into vectors for a retrieval index. The v2 rerank endpoint scores a set of documents against a query. All three authenticate with the same Bearer API key against the same host, and all three carry different data out of your environment. A gateway in front of Cohere is the place to notice that difference and act on it.
The pattern is the same one that applies to any HTTP LLM provider, with a Cohere-specific wrinkle: rerank and embed both take your source documents as input, so the retrieval side of a RAG system leaks through Cohere routes that a chat-only policy never inspects.
The three routes carry different data
A gateway policy that treats Cohere as a single upstream misses the point. Each route has its own exposure profile.
The chat route sends prompt content and whatever context the application assembled. The embed route sends the raw text of documents that are about to enter a vector index, which for an enterprise corpus is often the most sensitive payload in the whole pipeline. The rerank route sends a query plus a list of candidate passages. A policy that only classifies chat prompts is blind to the two routes that move your document corpus.
Bind the call to a natural-person identity first
Cohere authenticates the API key, not the person behind the request. The key identifies the application. It says nothing about which analyst, clinician, or agent triggered the call. That is the post-authentication gap: the upstream provider sees one shared credential, and the human is invisible.
The gateway closes it by requiring the application to present the natural-person identity, carried from the identity provider, and binding the outbound Cohere call to it:
The Cohere key lives in the gateway, so the client never holds it and cannot address api.cohere.com directly. Egress control makes that a guarantee rather than a convention.
Per-route policy, not one blanket rule
Because the three routes carry different data, the policy should vary by route. A per-route policy attaches rules to the specific endpoint and evaluates the data class in the payload.
The embed rule is the one platforms forget. An indexing job that vectorizes a document store through /v2/embed is moving the corpus itself to a third party. Binding that route to a narrow service role, and classifying the documents before they leave, is the control that keeps a retrieval pipeline inside policy.
Constrain egress to the Cohere host
A policy that a client can route around is a suggestion. The gateway is only a control if outbound AI traffic has to pass through it, so egress from the application tier is restricted to the gateway, and only the gateway may reach api.cohere.com. This is the same egress control that any AI gateway relies on. Without it, a service that still holds a Cohere key can call the provider directly and the gateway records nothing.
Cohere is also reachable through Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, and private deployments such as Cohere's on-premise offering. Each of those is a different host, so the egress allow-list and the per-route policy have to name the endpoint actually in use. A private deployment inside your own network is still an HTTP endpoint a gateway can sit in front of, which is the model-agnostic case DeepInspect is built for.
Record every decision
Each pass-or-block decision produces a record. For Cohere traffic the record names the person, the route, the data class, and the outcome, so a later review can reconstruct what left the environment through which endpoint.
The record has to be committed before the response returns and on a write path the application cannot alter, or it is an application log rather than an audit record. That distinction is the whole point of putting the gateway outside the calling service.
DeepInspect
This is the problem DeepInspect was built to solve. Cohere gives you three routes with three exposure profiles and one shared key. DeepInspect sits at the AI request boundary in front of all three, binds each call to the natural-person identity the application supplies, classifies the payload against regulated data types, and applies a per-route policy before the request reaches api.cohere.com.
The decision is deterministic and fail-closed, and enforcement overhead measures under 50 ms in internal testing against Cohere inference that runs far longer. Every decision commits a signed, identity-bound audit record before the response returns, on a write path the application never controls, so a review can prove which person moved which data class through the chat, embed, or rerank route. If you are running Cohere behind a shared key and cannot say who sent what to which endpoint, book a demo today.
Frequently asked questions
- Does Cohere authenticate the end user?
No. Cohere authenticates the API key presented in the Bearer header, which identifies the application or service, not the natural person who triggered the call. Every request under one key looks identical to Cohere. A gateway restores the missing identity by requiring the application to present the user identity from the identity provider, binding the outbound Cohere call to it, and holding the Cohere key itself so the client cannot bypass the check.
- Why treat Cohere embed and rerank differently from chat?
Because they carry different data. The chat route sends prompts and assembled context. The embed route sends the raw documents being vectorized for a retrieval index, and the rerank route sends candidate passages scored against a query. For an enterprise RAG pipeline, the embed and rerank routes move the source corpus to a third party, which is often more sensitive than any single chat prompt. A per-route policy classifies and authorizes each endpoint on its own terms.
- Can a gateway sit in front of a private Cohere deployment?
Yes. A private or on-premise Cohere deployment is still an HTTP endpoint, so a model-agnostic gateway terminates the client connection, applies identity-bound policy, and forwards to the private host. The egress allow-list and the per-route policy name the specific endpoint in use, whether that is the public Cohere host, a Bedrock or Azure route, or a deployment inside your own network. The enforcement pattern does not change with the location of the model.
- What belongs in the audit record for Cohere traffic?
At minimum the natural-person identity, the route, the data classification of the payload, the pass-or-block decision, the policy version in effect, and a timestamp. That lets a later review reconstruct which person moved which class of data through the chat, embed, or rerank endpoint. The record has to be committed before the response returns, on a write path the calling application cannot modify, which is what separates an audit record from an ordinary application log.