Is LiteLLM safe to use in 2026?

The LiteLLM Proxy had a genuine run of CVEs in 2026, including one added to the CISA KEV catalog, and BerriAI has responded with an external audit, a bug bounty, a stability program, and a Rust rewrite. The critical bypasses were gated behind non-default configuration or untrusted network reachability, and BerriAI states no Cloud customers were affected. The Python SDK was not the vulnerable surface. Whether it is safe for you depends on your deployment: patch to a current release, avoid exposing the proxy to untrusted networks, and treat the gateway's own auth surface as a target.

What is the difference between the LiteLLM SDK and the proxy?

The SDK is a library you import into your application to normalize many providers into OpenAI format, running in your process with no server. The proxy is a standalone HTTP gateway with virtual keys, budgets, rate limits, guardrails, and logging. The proxy is the product people compare to other gateways and the surface every 2026 CVE targeted. Conflating the two produces the incorrect claim that "LiteLLM is insecure" when the SDK and the proxy have entirely different exposure.

Which LiteLLM alternative is the most secure?

That depends on what you mean by secure. For enterprise API governance, Kong and Apigee with Model Armor are strong. For a self-hosted platform in your VPC, TrueFoundry fits. Portkey is now inside Palo Alto Networks and folds into Prisma AIRS. None of these routing and governance gateways, on its own, enforces per-request identity-bound policy plus prompt classification plus a signed audit record. That combination is a distinct enforcement layer that runs in front of whichever router you pick.

Should I switch away from LiteLLM entirely?

Not necessarily. LiteLLM's provider coverage and routing are widely used for good reason, and switching a router is disruptive. A common pattern is to keep LiteLLM for routing and add an enforcement layer in front of it for identity-bound policy and independent audit evidence. That separates the concern LiteLLM handles well, reaching many models, from the concern a regulated workload needs handled independently, proving what each call did under which identity.

Do these gateways produce audit records regulators accept?

Most produce operational logs and traces, and some, like LiteLLM Enterprise and Portkey, add management-plane audit logs tracking configuration changes. Those are valuable for running the platform. A regulator testing EU AI Act Article 12 traceability or a DORA review is asking a narrower question: is there an independent, tamper-evident record of each AI decision tied to an identity. Few routing gateways produce that, because a trace written by the system under review is the self-attestation problem, and independence is the property the auditor is testing.

LiteLLM Alternatives in 2026: Routing Layers, Security Layers, and What Each One Actually Enforces

LiteLLM ships in two forms, and the distinction decides most of this article. The LiteLLM Python SDK normalizes 100-plus providers into OpenAI format inside your application, with no server. The LiteLLM Proxy Server, which BerriAI also markets as an AI gateway, is a standalone HTTP proxy with virtual keys, budgets, rate limits, guardrails, and logging. The proxy is the thing teams compare to other gateways, and the proxy is where every 2026 CVE landed. The SDK is not the vulnerable surface.

I want to give an honest map of the alternatives, because "LiteLLM is insecure, switch" is a lazy conclusion and a MuleSoft or Kong buyer will see through it. LiteLLM is widely used for good reasons, it is actively hardening, and the real question for a team evaluating alternatives is what layer they actually need: a router, or an enforcement point. Those are different products even when they share the word gateway.

Why teams look for an alternative

Two reasons, and I will be fair about both.

The first is the 2026 security record on the proxy. After a suspected supply-chain incident in March 2026, BerriAI brought in Veria Labs for an audit and launched a bug bounty. Then the CVEs came. CVE-2026-42271, an authenticated command injection in the MCP stdio test endpoints affecting versions 1.74.2 up to 1.83.7, was added to the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on June 8, 2026, and it escalates to unauthenticated remote code execution when chained with CVE-2026-48710, a Starlette host-header bypass. Over the June 21-22 weekend a batch of five more arrived, led by CVE-2026-12773, an auth bypass in the UserAPIKeyAuth path scored 7.3 by the issuing CNA and re-scored 9.8 by NVD. I wrote about what the LiteLLM CVE wave teaches about control-plane design separately. The fair caveats: the critical bypasses were gated behind non-default configuration or untrusted network reachability, BerriAI states no LiteLLM Cloud customers were affected, and all of it hit the proxy rather than the SDK.

The second reason is operational. LiteLLM moves fast, ships weekly, and ran a public stability campaign in 2026 with load tests and incident post-mortems. It is now porting the gateway to Rust. A team that wants a slower, heavier, more governance-first layer looks elsewhere, and that is a fit decision rather than a verdict.

What LiteLLM Enterprise adds, and where it stops

The paid tier is real. It adds SSO and SAML, SCIM, OIDC and JWT auth, key and team guardrails, secret-manager integration, key rotation, and audit logs, and BerriAI holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. One precision matters for anyone evaluating it for compliance: the enterprise audit logs record create, update, and delete on Teams and Virtual Keys. That is management-plane change tracking. It is a different artifact than a signed per-request record of what each AI call did with what data under which identity.

The alternatives landscape, sorted by what each enforces

| Product | Category | Honest one-liner | What it actually enforces | |---|---|---|---| | Kong AI Gateway | Security / governance | Full API-management platform extended to LLM, MCP, and A2A; the heavyweight enterprise option. | PII sanitization, semantic prompt guards, access control, token and quota management, RBAC, audit. | | Portkey | Now part of a security vendor | Acquired by Palo Alto Networks (announced April 2026), becoming the AI gateway for Prisma AIRS. | Guardrails, RBAC, virtual keys, budgets, org audit logs, 3,000+ models; no longer a neutral independent. | | Apigee + Model Armor | Enterprise APIM | Google Cloud's API platform used as an AI gateway; heavy, Google-centric. | Auth, quotas, cost visibility; Model Armor adds prompt-injection detection and sensitive-data protection. | | Cloudflare AI Gateway | Observability / control plane | Edge observability and caching layer; broad and cheap, policy depth still shallow. | Analytics, logging, caching, rate limiting, fallback; DLP and Guardrails still Beta. | | Vercel AI Gateway | Routing + data-routing governance | Zero-markup unified endpoint welded to the Vercel AI SDK; great DX, Vercel-centric, SaaS-only. | ZDR by default, provider allowlist, disallow-training, spend caps; no identity policy or signed audit. | | OpenRouter | Hosted marketplace | The largest hosted model marketplace, 400+ models behind one key; a real guardrails layer bound to keys. | PII and injection guardrails, budgets, allowlists; policy binds to API keys, prompts transit a SaaS. | | Envoy AI Gateway | Routing-first, OSS | 1.0 shipped June 23, 2026, Tetrate-led on CNCF Envoy Gateway; infrastructure-grade routing. | 16-provider routing, MCP gateway, quota-aware multi-tenancy, upstream auth, OpenTelemetry. | | agentgateway | Agent-traffic governance, OSS | The project formerly pitched as Gloo AI Gateway; created by Solo.io, donated to the Linux Foundation in August 2025. | A2A and MCP authorization, observability, governance for agent-to-tool traffic. | | TrueFoundry | Self-hostable platform | Kubernetes-native AI platform where the gateway is one module; runs in your VPC. | LLM, MCP, and agent routing, RBAC, budgets, guardrails, self-hosted control plane. | | Bifrost (Maxim) | Performance-first, OSS | Go-based speed play claiming very low overhead; benchmarks are the pitch. | Load balancing, virtual keys, budgets, rate limits, guardrails, MCP client and server. |

Routing versus enforcement, precisely

The single most useful cut through this list is which products route traffic and which enforce policy. OpenRouter, Vercel, Bifrost, and Helicone are routing and observability first. Kong, Apigee with Model Armor, Portkey now inside Palo Alto, and TrueFoundry make real governance claims. Envoy AI Gateway is routing-first with auth and multi-tenancy, without prompt-level classification. LiteLLM Enterprise sits in the middle, offering SSO, guardrails, and management-plane audit.

None of the routing-native gateways enforce the specific combination a regulated workload needs: per-request identity-bound policy, plus prompt-level classification across regulated data types, plus a signed per-decision audit record, plus fail-closed behavior. The difference between a firewall, a gateway, and a proxy is exactly this question of what each layer is built to do, and most tools in this table are built to move traffic well, not to produce evidence.

DeepInspect

This is the gap DeepInspect closes, and it is a different layer than most of the list rather than a replacement for it. Many teams keep LiteLLM, Envoy AI Gateway, or OpenRouter as the routing layer and add DeepInspect for enforcement and evidence.

DeepInspect is a stateless proxy at the AI request boundary. It binds each call to the natural-person or agent identity the application supplies, classifies the prompt content against the regulated categories your sector recognizes, applies per-route and per-role policy, and commits a signed per-decision audit record before the response returns, on a write path the application never holds. It is deterministic, fail-closed, and model-agnostic, so it runs in front of whichever router you chose. The security properties a gateway needs to stand behind a regulated deployment are identity binding, classification, and independent evidence, and those are the properties DeepInspect is built around. If you are replacing or wrapping a LiteLLM deployment and you are facing the August EU AI Act deadline, book an audit at deepinspect.ai.