Kong AI Gateway and the EU AI Act: Compliance Without the Rewrites

The Requirement: Article 10 of the EU AI Act mandates strict data governance for high-risk AI systems. This includes error detection, bias monitoring, and arguably most critically for enterprise use — ensuring that sensitive personal data (PII) is not improperly processed or leaked into public models.

The Kong Solution: Instead of asking developers to manually sanitize inputs in every Python script or Java app, you can enforce data governance at the gateway level before the request ever leaves your perimeter.

• AI PII Sanitizer: Automatically detects and redacts entities like names, SSNs, and emails from prompts before they reach the LLM.
• Prompt Guard and Response Guard: Enforce a hard boundary on what data enters and exits your organization, preventing "data leakage" that could violate Article 10’s governance standards.
• Cloud Integrations: Kong integrates with AWS Bedrock Guardrails, AI Azure Content Safety, and Google Cloud Model Armor capabilities to provide a defense-in-depth strategy.

The Requirement: Article 12 requires high-risk AI systems to have automatic recording of events (logs) to ensure traceability of the system's functioning. Furthermore, Article 26 (Obligations of Deployers) requires enterprises to monitor these systems and keep logs for at least six months.

The Kong Solution: Fragmented logs are a compliance nightmare. Kong standardizes logging across all your AI traffic.

• AI Proxy Advanced: Captures comprehensive logs of every prompt, response, latency metric, and model used. This creates the "paper trail" required by auditors to prove conformity.
• AI Semantic Cache: Beyond performance, caching provides a deterministic record of exactly what inputs produced what outputs, further aiding in traceability.
• Unified Format: Whether a team is using OpenAI, Anthropic, or a self-hosted Llama 3, Kong logs the interaction in a consistent format, making post-market monitoring (Article 72) feasible.
  
  

The Requirement: Article 9 requires a continuous "risk management system" to identify and mitigate risks to health, safety, and fundamental rights. Article 15 demands that systems achieve appropriate levels of accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity.

The Kong Solution: Kong acts as the enforcement point for your risk management policies.

• Centralized Guardrails: You can implement policies that block hallucinations, toxic content, or jailbreak attempts at the gateway. If a prompt violates your risk policy, it is rejected by Kong, never reaching the model.
• LLM-as-a-Judge: You can use a smaller, faster model to "judge" the output of a larger model for compliance and safety before sending it back to the user, automating the risk mitigation loop.
• Cybersecurity: By centralizing AI access, Kong protects against model denial-of-service (DoS) and credential leakage, directly addressing the cybersecurity mandates of Article 15.
  

The Requirement: Article 50 (formerly Article 52 in drafts) enforces transparency obligations. Users must be informed when they are interacting with an AI system (like a chatbot) and deepfakes or synthetic content must be clearly marked.

The Kong Solution: Transparency requires visibility. You cannot disclose what you do not track.

• Model Independence: Kong abstracts the underlying model. If you need to swap a model because it fails a transparency or compliance check, you can do so at the gateway without changing application code.
• Header Injection & Decoration: Kong can inject system messages or headers that force models to self-identify or append disclaimers to responses, ensuring that the "I am an AI" disclosure required by Article 50 is consistently applied across all chatbots in your fleet.

The Requirement: Article 14 requires that AI systems be designed for effective human oversight. Article 26 places the burden on the deployer (the enterprise) to assign human oversight and monitor the system for anomalies.

The Kong Solution: Kong empowers the "humans in the loop" (Platform Engineers and Compliance Officers) with the tools they need to oversee the system.

• AI RAG Injector: By forcing AI models to use your vetted enterprise data (Retrieval Augmented Generation) rather than their internal training data, you drastically reduce hallucinations and ensure the system remains "under control."
• AI Prompt Decorator: Enforce "system prompts" that set behavioral boundaries (e.g., "You are a helpful assistant for Acme Corp, do not provide financial advice") globally. This ensures that no individual developer can bypass the oversight instructions defined by your compliance team.

The EU AI Act is not just a checklist; it’s a mandate for governance. Trying to bolt this governance onto every single microservice is a recipe for failure.

Kong AI Gateway offers a cleaner path: governance at the edge. By centralizing your AI traffic, you can solve for data protection, logging, risk, and transparency in one place. You get to be compliant with the EU AI Act, and your developers get to keep coding without rewriting their apps.