Engineering notes on keeping autonomous agents secure, solvent, and running.
Autonomous agents holding raw provider API keys are a breach waiting to happen. Here is how virtual key abstraction contains the blast radius, and why encryption at rest is not enough.
A single 429 can cascade into a stalled agent workflow, wasted compute, and silent data loss. Here is why exponential backoff and provider fallback both fail agents, and how key-pool shuffling fixes it.
What actually matters when you pick an AI gateway for autonomous agents, credential isolation, a hard spend kill-switch, 429 resilience, and verifiable audit, compared honestly across the main options.
Practical ways to prevent runaway LLM costs from autonomous agents, org caps vs per-key caps, kill-switches, and a two-minute setup that blocks spend mid-request.
What a tamper-evident audit log is, how an HMAC-SHA256 hash chain makes logs verifiable, and why it matters for auditing what your AI agents actually did.
Rate limits cap how often an agent calls a model, they do not cap how much it can spend. Here is why frequency controls fail as budget controls, and how per-key dollar caps stop a runaway agent at a number you choose.
Autonomous agents read untrusted content and hold credentials in the same process. That combination is a new class of risk. Here is a practical threat model for agent credentials, and how to shrink the blast radius.
Not all LLM gateways solve the same problem. This checklist separates routing conveniences from security controls, so agent teams can tell marketplaces, observability tools, and security gateways apart before they commit.