A10 AI Gateway

A10 AI Gateway is an enterprise control plane that sits between your applications, copilots and autonomous agents and every large language model they call. It routes each request to the cheapest model that can handle it, enforces identity-based access policy and per-team token budgets, and reports spend per request — all running inside your own on-premises, private-cloud or air-gapped environment rather than a vendor SaaS.

A10 AI Gateway is a self-hosted control plane that A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN) took to general availability on 13 August 2026, introduced at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas. It sits between an organisation's applications, copilots and autonomous agents and every large language model those workloads call, whether hosted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI or run privately. Its distinguishing behaviour is complexity-aware routing: the gateway classifies each incoming prompt as simple or complex and forwards it to the cheapest model that can serve it, escalating only reasoning-intensive work to more capable models, with priority-chain cascading that shifts traffic to an alternative model once a budget is consumed. Around that sit the governance controls enterprises have lacked since shadow AI spending began — virtual API keys scoped per user or team with their own budgets and rate limits, identity-based access and routing policies synchronised with existing directory systems so engineering and finance can be given different model catalogues, real-time per-request cost tracking in dollars instead of an end-of-month provider invoice, hard and soft token budgets per model and per team, business-layer RPM and TPM rate limiting enforced per key or team, and a provider credential vault using OpenBao-backed encryption so raw provider keys never reach developers. Guardrails today are lightweight pattern-based regex filtering of both requests and responses, with A10 positioning stronger controls as policies mature. The product ships as software or integrated hardware and runs entirely inside the customer environment — on-premises, private cloud or air-gapped — deployed via Helm on Kubernetes with single-tenant isolation, which is the whole point for regulated and sovereign-AI buyers. It complements A10's TrojAI acquisition (AI red teaming and runtime model protection) and its ThreatX web application and API protection line, giving A10 coverage from pre-deployment model testing through runtime enforcement.

Category

Infrastructure & Cloud

Pricing

Contact for pricing

Target Market

CIOs, CTOs, Platform Engineering Leads, FinOps Teams, Enterprise Developers, Security Architects

Deployment

Self-hosted, Hybrid

Founded

2004

Headquarters

San Jose, United States

Team Size

500+

Customers

A10 Networks reports roughly 7,000 customers globally across its whole portfolio as of FY2025; no customer count has been published for the AI Gateway specifically

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  Complexity-aware model routing

  Classifies each prompt as simple or complex and routes it to the cheapest model capable of serving it, escalating only reasoning-heavy work.

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  Priority-chain cascading

  Automatically shifts requests to an alternative model when a team or model budget is consumed, so workloads degrade gracefully instead of failing.

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  Virtual API keys

  Scoped keys per user or team, each with its own token budget and rate limit, so access can be revoked without touching provider credentials.

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  Provider credential vault

  Stores OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure and other provider credentials with OpenBao-backed encryption so raw keys never reach application developers.

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  Real-time per-request cost tracking

  Reports dollar spend as requests happen rather than at month end, with hard limits and soft-limit alerts per model and per team.

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  Identity-based access policy

  Applies access and routing rules by user and group profile, synchronised with existing local directory systems such as Active Directory.

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  Business-layer rate limiting

  Enforces requests-per-minute and tokens-per-minute caps per key or team to protect shared inference infrastructure from a single noisy workload.

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  In-environment deployment

  Runs as software or integrated hardware on-premises, in private cloud or air-gapped, via Helm with single-tenant isolation per customer.

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  AI cost attribution and chargeback

  Finance gets per-team, per-model dollar spend in real time and can charge AI consumption back to the business unit that generated it.

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  Shadow AI consolidation

  Route every application and agent through one governed egress point so security can see which teams call which models with what data.

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  Inference cost reduction

  Send routine classification and summarisation prompts to cost-efficient models while reserving frontier models for genuinely complex reasoning tasks.

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  Sovereign and air-gapped AI

  Regulated and public-sector operators keep all model traffic, policy and telemetry inside their own boundary with no vendor SaaS dependency.

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  Runaway agent containment

  Token budgets and RPM/TPM limits per virtual key stop a looping autonomous agent from burning an entire quarterly AI budget overnight.

A10 publishes no list price for the AI Gateway anywhere on its product page, in the GA press release or in trade coverage — it is a quote-only enterprise sale consistent with the rest of A10's portfolio, sold as either software or integrated hardware. There is no free tier and no advertised self-serve trial, so budget for a sales-led evaluation. Because the gateway runs inside your own environment, the licence is not the whole cost: you also carry the Kubernetes footprint and operational burden of running it, though A10 states no GPU is required for the base deployment.

This page was written from 6 sources, 3 on domains other than a10networks.com.

1. 1.a10networks.com — a10 ai gatewayvendor
2. 2.a10networks.com — ai gateway intelligent control planevendor
3. 3.a10networks.com — companyvendor
4. 4.helpnetsecurity.com — a10 networks introduces ai gateway to secure and manage ente
5. 5.stocktitan.net — a10 networks launches a10 ai gateway an intelligent control
6. 6.en.wikipedia.org — A10 Networks