Waygrid AI Gateway enters open beta
Today we are opening the Waygrid AI Gateway beta to all customers. For the past six months, design partners in banking, healthcare, and the public sector have been routing their production LLM traffic through it. Their feedback has shaped nearly every part of what ships today.
We built the AI Gateway because we kept hearing the same thing from customers who already trusted us with their APIs: AI had arrived in their organizations faster than governance could follow, and they wanted the traffic that carried their most sensitive data to run under the same controls as everything else. This beta is our answer.
What it does
The AI Gateway gives your organization one governed point of access to every model provider you use, commercial APIs and self-hosted models alike. Applications call one endpoint; the gateway handles provider routing, credential management, and failover. Security teams define what may be sent and to whom; finance teams see consumption by team, application, and provider, as it happens.
- Data protection: payload screening detects and blocks personal or classified data before it leaves your estate, with policies you write once and apply everywhere.
- Cost control: budgets and quotas per team or application, with alerts before a limit is reached rather than an invoice after.
- Auditability: every prompt and response is recorded under the same retention rules as the rest of your Waygrid estate, in your chosen jurisdiction.
The single-endpoint design is deliberate. It means an application does not need to know or care which provider answers a given request, and it means you can add a provider, retire one, or shift traffic between them without touching a line of application code. The gateway, not the app, holds the credentials and makes the routing decision, which is what makes every one of the controls above enforceable rather than aspirational.
What the beta taught us
Our design partners were unanimous on one point that surprised us: the audit trail mattered more than the routing. Several had paused internal AI projects not for lack of results, but because they could not answer basic questions from their risk committees. Restoring that visibility, they told us, was what turned pilots back on.
"We did not need permission to use AI. We needed to be able to show our regulator how we use it." — beta customer, retail banking
The second lesson was about cost, and it was consistent enough to be worth stating plainly: almost every partner discovered spend they did not know they had. A pilot someone believed was switched off. A prompt that had quietly grown to five times its original size. A retry loop that doubled a bill without changing an outcome. Making that waste visible, before the invoice arrived, changed how these teams thought about the gateway, from a compliance tool to a cost-control one.
Availability
The open beta is available now to all Waygrid customers at no additional cost during the beta period, deployable in our European regions or on your own infrastructure. General availability is planned for the first half of 2026. If you would like an introduction, your account team is ready, or you can request access directly from the platform console.
We will keep shipping through the beta, and we will keep listening. If the past six months taught us anything, it is that the teams actually running this traffic in production know things about it that no roadmap anticipates. Their feedback built this release, and it will build the next one.