Top 5 AI Gateways for Implementing Guardrails in AI Applications

As organizations move AI applications from prototypes to production, guardrails have become non-negotiable infrastructure. Without proper safeguards, LLM-powered systems risk generating hallucinated outputs, leaking sensitive data, violating compliance policies, and producing toxic or off-brand content. AI gateways provide the ideal enforcement layer for these guardrails because every model request flows through them, making them the natural chokepoint for policy enforcement, content moderation, and output validation.

This guide evaluates the top 5 AI gateways for implementing guardrails in production AI applications, based on guardrail capabilities, performance impact, governance depth, and developer experience.

Why AI Gateways Are the Right Layer for Guardrails

Implementing guardrails at the application level creates fragmented enforcement. Each microservice, agent, or workflow must independently implement safety checks, leading to inconsistent policies and maintenance overhead. AI gateways solve this by centralizing guardrail enforcement at the infrastructure layer. Key advantages include:

• Consistent policy enforcement: Every LLM request, regardless of which application or team initiates it, passes through the same guardrail checks
• Separation of concerns: Application developers focus on business logic while platform teams manage safety policies centrally
• Real-time intervention: Gateways can block unsafe outputs before they reach end users, without requiring application-level code changes
• Audit and compliance: Centralized logging of all guardrail interventions creates a comprehensive audit trail for regulatory requirements

With this context, here are the top 5 AI gateways for implementing guardrails in 2025.

1. Bifrost by Maxim AI

Bifrost is a high-performance, open-source AI gateway built in Go that delivers the most comprehensive guardrail and governance stack among modern LLM gateways. It combines real-time content moderation, policy enforcement, and output validation with virtually zero latency impact, benchmarked at just 11 µs overhead at 5,000 RPS.

Guardrail capabilities:

• Real-time output blocking: Automatically detects and blocks unsafe model outputs with configurable policy enforcement and content moderation across all connected agents
• Governance at every level: Usage tracking, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control enforced at the infrastructure layer where every AI request flows
• Budget guardrails: Hierarchical cost control with virtual keys, teams, and customer-level budgets that prevent runaway spending automatically
• MCP tool filtering: Control which tools AI agents can access through Model Context Protocol governance, preventing unauthorized tool invocations
• Role-based access control: Define which teams can access which models under specified conditions, with SSO integration for centralized authentication

What sets Bifrost apart is its integration with Maxim's end-to-end AI evaluation and observability platform. While Bifrost enforces guardrails at the gateway layer, Maxim provides continuous quality evaluation, trace-level analysis, and automated checks on production outputs. This creates a closed-loop system where guardrail violations detected in production feed back into evaluation workflows for continuous improvement. Additionally, Bifrost's custom plugin architecture allows teams to implement organization-specific guardrail logic as extensible middleware.

Performance: Bifrost adds virtually zero overhead to guardrail enforcement. At 5,000 RPS, it maintains 11 µs mean overhead, 54x faster P99 latency and 9.4x higher throughput than alternatives like LiteLLM on identical hardware, as documented in its open-source benchmarks.

Best for: Teams building production AI systems that need comprehensive guardrails without sacrificing performance, and organizations that want guardrails tightly integrated with evaluation and observability workflows.

2. LiteLLM

LiteLLM is an open-source gateway providing unified access to 100+ LLMs through OpenAI-compatible APIs. It offers a foundational guardrail layer through its proxy server mode, with basic content filtering and budget management capabilities.

Guardrail capabilities:

• Built-in keyword blocking: Block responses containing specified keywords or patterns through configurable filters
• Custom regex patterns: Define pattern-based detection rules for PII, competitor mentions, or prohibited content
• Budget management: Track and enforce spending limits per project or team with virtual key budgets
• Observability integrations: Connect with platforms like Langfuse and MLflow for monitoring guardrail performance

Considerations: LiteLLM's Python-based architecture introduces notable performance overhead at scale. Benchmarks show P99 latency reaching 90.72 seconds at 500 RPS compared to Bifrost's 1.68 seconds on identical hardware, which can impact real-time guardrail enforcement in high-throughput environments.

Best for: Python-heavy teams and smaller-scale deployments that need basic guardrail functionality with extensive provider compatibility.

3. Kong AI Gateway

Kong AI Gateway extends Kong's mature API management platform to AI traffic, bringing enterprise-grade governance and security capabilities that many organizations already rely on for traditional API management.

Guardrail capabilities:

• AI Prompt Guard plugin: Applies regex filters and semantic similarity checks against unsafe content vectors for multi-layered input protection
• PII sanitization: Automatically redacts sensitive information across 12 languages before prompts reach LLM providers
• RAG pipeline automation: Builds retrieval-augmented generation pipelines at the gateway layer to reduce hallucinations
• Prompt engineering controls: Customizes and optimizes prompts with built-in content safety enforcement and MCP governance support

Best for: Enterprises already using Kong for API management that want to extend existing governance policies to AI traffic without deploying a separate gateway.

4. Cloudflare AI Gateway

Cloudflare AI Gateway provides guardrails as part of Cloudflare's global edge network, leveraging Llama Guard for real-time content moderation with low-latency inference through its distributed GPU infrastructure.

Guardrail capabilities:

• Built-in content moderation: Evaluates both user prompts and model responses against configurable hazard categories including violence, hate speech, sexual content, and PII
• Flexible enforcement actions: Choose to flag, block, or ignore detected content per category, with granular control over prompts and responses independently
• DLP and prompt protection: Detects jailbreak attempts, credential exposure, and PII leakage using topic-based classification across popular AI applications
• Edge-deployed inference: Guardrail checks run on Cloudflare's distributed GPU network via Workers AI, minimizing latency impact on request processing

Considerations: Guardrails do not yet support streaming responses, and the platform lacks hierarchical budget controls or team-level governance features found in gateways like Bifrost. There is also no self-hosted deployment option for organizations with strict data residency requirements.

Best for: Teams already on Cloudflare's infrastructure that need content moderation guardrails with global edge deployment and minimal setup overhead.

5. OpenRouter

OpenRouter is a unified API for accessing 200+ models with transparent pricing and intelligent model routing. Its guardrail approach centers on model selection and cost-based routing rather than traditional content moderation.

Guardrail capabilities:

• Model-level safety routing: Route requests to models with built-in safety features based on content sensitivity requirements
• Cost guardrails: Automatic routing to lower-cost alternatives and credits-based billing with spend visibility
• Usage dashboards: Track spending and usage patterns across providers to identify anomalies
• Provider fallbacks: Seamlessly switch between providers when primary options are unavailable

Considerations: OpenRouter lacks real-time content moderation, PII detection, or configurable policy enforcement at the gateway layer. Teams requiring comprehensive AI governance will need to layer additional guardrail tooling on top.

Best for: Developers in experimentation-heavy workflows who primarily need cost guardrails and model routing optimization rather than content safety enforcement.

How to Choose the Right Gateway for Guardrails

When evaluating AI gateways for guardrail implementation, consider the following criteria:

• Enforcement depth: Does the gateway support real-time blocking, or only post-hoc detection? Production systems with regulatory requirements typically need real-time enforcement
• Performance impact: Guardrail checks should not introduce meaningful latency. Gateways built in systems languages like Go (Bifrost) offer significant performance advantages over Python-based alternatives
• Governance breadth: Look for hierarchical controls (organization → team → project → user) that align with your organizational structure
• Integration with evaluation workflows: Guardrails are most effective when connected to continuous evaluation. Platforms like Maxim that combine gateway-level enforcement with simulation and evaluation workflows enable teams to continuously refine their safety policies
• Extensibility: Custom guardrail logic is inevitable as your AI applications mature. Prefer gateways with plugin architectures that support organization-specific rules

Conclusion

AI gateways have evolved from simple routing proxies into comprehensive guardrail enforcement platforms. Among the options available, Bifrost by Maxim AI stands out for combining real-time guardrail enforcement, deep governance controls, and near-zero latency impact in a single open-source package, with the added advantage of integration into Maxim's full-stack AI quality platform for end-to-end safety assurance.

Regardless of which gateway you choose, implementing guardrails at the infrastructure layer rather than the application layer is the most reliable approach to building safe, compliant AI systems at scale.