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Blog

Writing from the people who build Kirto: where control over an agent's calls lives, what reaches the model, and how the processes agents work inside are run and replayed.

Latest · Governance in practice · Part 3Forrester's six AEGIS domains, and what closes eachForrester's AEGIS names six domains of guardrail for agentic AI. Which of them close while one process holds the connection, and what closes the rest of each.11 min readAbout Gate

The agent control plane

What AI agents do to an enterprise's execution paths, why the vendors on those paths cannot be the neutral control over them, and what the agent control plane is.

Where control lives

Six kinds of product sit between an application and a model, and each arrived carrying its first buyer's concerns. One post per position, one request walked past each of them, and what that position can do to it.

Where control lives · Part 1Where AI governance came fromBy 2 August 2026 the EU had deferred every AI Act obligation shaped like model approval, and left standing the one discharged while the system is in use. AI governance was built for the first kind: an inventory, a validation, documentation, a gate before deployment.7 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 2Policy, enforcement and evidenceIn most AI programmes nothing on the request path enforces the policy while the call is in flight. Policy decides what should be true. Evidence shows afterwards that it was.4 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 3Who is on the request pathSix kinds of product sit on the path between your application and a model. This series takes them one at a time and asks each what it can do while it holds the connection, and whose record it keeps.4 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 4Buying models through a marketplaceA model marketplace sits where the provider sits: it holds the prompt, sets the retention and keeps the record of each call. Its own pages say where prompts go and how long they stay, and the record stays with the marketplace.4 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 5Proxies and the unified APIOne API for every provider is a good trade until somebody asks what the provider actually received. A proxy that parses your request into its own shape and writes it back cannot answer, because what survives is whatever that shape knew about the week it was written.6 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 6Response cachingA response cache in front of the model saves the whole call, including the part where something decided about it. Caching belongs where the model's own cache is, and a gateway earns the provider's discount by leaving the bytes alone.6 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 7API gateways with AI pluginsKeep the API gateway you already run: its AI plugin covers keys and a spend cap on the model route. Its vocabulary is routes and headers, so every plugin that has to read a body ends in a call out to something that can.5 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 8The cloud's own AI servicesBedrock Guardrails, Azure's API Management and Google's Model Armor are excellent inside the account that runs them. The record they keep lands in that account too, under its IAM, which decides what a verifier outside the account can establish.4 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 9Calling a detectorA gateway can call any detector, and what comes back is a verdict about the string it handed over. Presidio, Lakera, Prisma AIRS, Guardrails AI and NeMo are all called this way. Deciding on the verdict is still the job of whatever holds the connection.4 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 10Governance platformsA governance platform cannot produce evidence of a call it did not witness. The runtime that witnessed it has to hand over a record the platform can check without trusting the runtime. Credo AI, Holistic AI, IBM's watsonx.governance and OneTrust own the policy document and the evidence binder.4 min readAbout GateWhere control lives · Part 11Comparing the six positionsThree questions can be asked of any vendor on the AI request path, and each of its six positions answers them differently, Gate included. Ten posts, six positions, one question each, on one figure.4 min readAbout Gate

What reaches the model

A prompt is assembled at runtime out of a conversation, a record lookup and a tool result. What arrives in it, who wrote each part, and what a detector can and cannot tell you about any of it.

What reaches the model · Part 1The tool result is the channelPrompt injection reaches an agent through anything it reads, from an attacker who is not the user. Direct injection comes from the user turn, indirect injection from a tool result: mail, a document, a web page. Gate reads both.5 min readAbout GateWhat reaches the model · Part 2Nine ways to phrase an overrideAn injection is written in one of nine pattern families, and a classifier trained on some of them misses the others. A field guide, with one fresh example of each.6 min readAbout GateWhat reaches the model · Part 3Injection, jailbreak, harmfulInjection, jailbreak and harmful requests are three classes of text, and a control built for one does little against the others. A classifier trained on one class fires on another, and one MultiJail prompt shows how.5 min readAbout GateWhat reaches the model · Part 4Safety is measured in EnglishModels give unsafe answers more often in low-resource languages, because alignment data is English. The guards built to stop them share the same defect from the same root.4 min readAbout GateWhat reaches the model · Part 5Classifier or judgeA classifier and a judge fail at different things, so the choice depends on what the policy can be written as. A classifier learns one question from a training set. A judge reads the policy in prose and decides on exactly what the attacker sent.3 min readAbout GateWhat reaches the model · Part 6An evaluation set in a language with noneNo public Arabic prompt-injection set exists, so recall on Arabic attacks is unmeasured. Gate is building one with parallel pairs so the verdict can be compared across languages, hard negatives that outnumber attacks, and an origin tag on every row.6 min readAbout Gate

Governance in practice

One written control at a time, from the obligation as an auditor states it to the rule that discharges it on a live request.

Measured, not asserted

How the numbers on this site are produced: what the harness runs, what a measurement has to carry before it counts, and the results that went the wrong way.

Executing the standard

How Flow runs BPMN, CMMN, DMN and Arazzo as written, and the agent features that turned out to need no new format because the standards already had them.