AI Gateway TLS Termination: Why the Inspection Point Has to Decrypt the Request Body
An AI gateway terminates the outbound TLS session to the LLM provider so the inspection point can read the JSON request body in plaintext, classify the prompt content, evaluate identity-aware policy, and write a per-decision audit record. The architectural choice differs from a pass-through proxy at three points: control of the certificate chain, decryption authority over the prompt body, and re-encryption to the upstream provider with the gateway-managed identity. I walk through how the termination works, what it costs, and what the 2026 compliance set requires from the inspection point.
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