AI Gateway vs AI Backend
An AI gateway sits in front of your LLM to route, log, and cache traffic.
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An AI gateway is a thin proxy in front of one or more LLM providers. Its job is traffic management: routing requests to the right model, logging usage, caching responses, and giving you basic observability. It watches the traffic that passes through it.
An AI backend is the full infrastructure layer between your application and your model providers. It includes what a gateway does, and adds the parts you would otherwise have to build yourself: multi-tenant authentication, CORS handling so browsers can call it directly, conversation memory, PII scrubbing, prompt-injection defense, rate limiting, token budgets, kill switches, and self-hosted deployment.
The short version
A gateway observes; a backend operates. Behest is the AI Token FinOps platform with governance built in — and it can also operate as your full AI backend if you choose, though that is optional, not a requirement. If all you need is routing and logging, a gateway is enough; if you need cost control, governance, and browser-callable AI without standing up a proxy of your own, that is backend territory.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an AI gateway and an AI backend?
An AI gateway sits in front of your LLM and watches traffic — routing, logging, and caching requests. An AI backend operates the full infrastructure: authentication, CORS handling, conversation memory, PII scrubbing, prompt injection defense, rate limiting, token budgets, and observability. A gateway observes; a backend operates. Behest is the AI Token FinOps platform with governance built in — and it can also operate as your full AI backend if you choose, though that's optional, not a requirement.
How does Behest compare to legacy AI gateways?
Legacy gateways are primarily for routing and observability. Behest adds deep AI Token FinOps — hard budget enforcement before the invoice, per-session cost attribution, and clean chargebacks — plus AI Governance (PII redaction, prompt-injection defense, model allowlists). If you need enterprise cost control and compliance, Behest provides the guardrails gateways lack.