Identity-aware gateway
An identity-aware gateway is a proxy that requires a verified identity assertion on every inbound request and uses that identity as a first-class input to the policy decision. The gateway extracts the subject from a JWT, SSO session, mTLS certificate, or workload identity token, validates the assertion against the issuer, and binds the verified subject to the per-request policy evaluation and the per-decision audit record. An identity-blind gateway evaluates the request payload only, with the caller's identity sitting outside the decision.
How an identity-aware gateway differs from an LLM router
A traditional LLM router or proxy forwards requests, may rewrite headers, may load-balance across providers, and produces aggregate logs. Identity context, when present at all, lives in the application layer above the router and stays there. The gateway lacks the inputs needed to enforce per-user or per-role limits.
An identity-aware gateway binds the verified subject to every decision and every audit record. Per-route policies become per-route and per-role policies. The audit record names the caller, the data class, the policy version that decided, and the outcome. EU AI Act Article 12 traceability obligations, Fannie Mae Lender Letter LL-2026-04 disclosure-on-demand requirements, and NIST AI RMF action lineage all require this binding. Identity is the input regulators expect to find when they replay a decision.
Related reading
- Identity-Aware AI Gateway Architecture: How Inline Enforcement Binds Decisions to Users and Agents
An identity-aware AI gateway sits at the AI request boundary, attaches verified identity context to every model API call, evaluates per-route and per-role policies, and commits a per-decision audit record before the model response returns to the calling application. The architecture closes the post-authentication gap that most enterprise AI deployments have inherited from the credential-pooling pattern used by SDKs and proxy frameworks. This piece walks through the architectural building blocks, the call path, the audit primitives, and where the identity-aware gateway sits relative to existing IAM, API gateway, and DLP infrastructure.
- AI Inline Enforcement Architecture: Where the Policy Decision Sits and What It Has To Commit
AI inline enforcement runs the policy decision in the request path, before the model API call returns to the calling application. The architecture places a deterministic policy decision point between the application identity and the model endpoint and commits a per-decision audit record before the response forwards. This piece walks through the architectural components, the decision-time data shape, the failure modes the implementation has to handle, and the regulatory profile that the inline placement satisfies (EU AI Act Article 12, NIST AI agent identity and authorization Pillar 2 and Pillar 3, Fannie Mae LL-2026-04, DORA Article 6).