Trying to develop or use AI at your company? Ensuring the safety and compliance of large language model (LLM) applications is no trivial task. Models can return unpredictable responses, expose confidential data, or fail at critical moments. That’s why Requesty—an LLM router designed to easily connect you to the best AI provider—has expanded its focus on guardrails and security. Whether you’re looking to redact PII, safeguard secret keys, or maintain compliance with EU data hosting regulations, Requesty offers a robust approach to “safe AI.”
Read on to discover how Requesty’s advanced guardrails help you build a secure LLM pipeline—without sacrificing performance or cost-effectiveness.
1. Why Guardrails Matter in LLM Applications
Large language models like Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3-7 Sonnet, Deepseek V3, OpenAI o3 mini, and OpenAI o1 can be incredibly powerful. But as their capabilities grow, so does the risk of unintended outputs. These can include:
Sensitive Data Leaks: LLMs may inadvertently reveal user information, code snippets containing access tokens, or other proprietary data if you’re not controlling the prompts and outputs carefully.
Prompt Injection and Policy Violations: Attackers can manipulate your prompts, causing LLMs to generate harmful content or breach compliance guidelines.
Cost Overruns and Rate Limits: Without guardrails, your application could trigger excessive or expensive requests, leading to unplanned costs—or hitting model provider rate limits at the worst possible moment.
Requesty was built to address these challenges at scale, offering you a safe, flexible, and future-proof way to leverage multiple AI providers.
2. Requesty: An Alternative to OpenRouter, Portkey, Litellm, and Glama
If you’ve previously explored solutions like OpenRouter, Portkey, Litellm, or Glama, you’ll find that Requesty provides:
Unified Routing: A single API endpoint to manage all your LLM calls, whether you rely on Claude 3-7 Sonnet for creative text or OpenAI o3 mini for code generation.
Always-Online Reliability: Intelligent failover ensures you never lose functionality—if one provider slows down or goes offline, the router automatically transitions to another.
Advanced Guardrails: Built-in or customizable checks that enforce your security, policy, and compliance requirements before or after each AI call.
We also feature direct integrations with developer-first tools like Cline, Roo Code, Aider, OpenWebUI, and LibreChat to seamlessly extend your LLM usage across various coding, chat, and data-processing use cases.
3. PII Redaction and Secret Key Protection
3.1 PII Redaction
When it comes to safeguarding personal data, redaction is key. With Requesty’s guardrails:
Automatic Masking: Requesty can detect and replace sensitive data—like phone numbers, email addresses, or credit card information—with placeholders (
{{PHONE_NUMBER_1}},{{EMAIL_ADDRESS_1}}, etc.) before they reach an external LLM.Comprehensive Scanning: Whether it’s a user chat, an uploaded document, or the system’s own classification prompts, Requesty scans for personally identifiable information (PII) so none of it leaves your environment unintentionally.
3.2 Secret Key Redaction
Guardrails can also look for API keys, tokens, or other secrets in both incoming and outgoing traffic. If any such string is detected, it’s automatically scrubbed before sending the request to a model:
plaintextCopyEdit"Here is our AWS key: ABCD1234" → "Here is our AWS key: {{SECRET_KEY_1}}"
This ensures that no proprietary tokens or credentials end up in the LLM’s memory or logs.
4. EU Server Hosting & Compliance
For organizations in need of strict regional compliance, Requesty offers EU-based hosting:
Regional Data Handling: All traffic can be routed exclusively through EU data centers for GDPR compliance or your organization’s internal requirements.
Transparent Logging: Every request is logged in a privacy-compliant manner. Combined with guardrails, any PII can be redacted before logs are stored.
As regulations evolve, you can rest easy knowing Requesty’s flexible architecture can adapt to new compliance regimes without forcing you to rebuild your AI stack.
5. Guardrails in Practice: Example Flow
When a user makes a request (e.g., “Generate a snippet of code that accesses our internal database using the dev key”), Requesty’s pipeline ensures:
Input Guardrails
Detect potential secrets, PII, or disallowed content.
Redact any discovered sensitive tokens before sending the prompt to a model.
If the request triggers a deny policy (e.g., malicious or disallowed content), it’s blocked outright.
LLM Selection
Based on the user’s request type, cost sensitivity, and fallback chain, Requesty chooses an appropriate model like Deepseek V3 (for analysis) or OpenAI o1 (for general tasks).
Output Guardrails
Check the model’s response for PII, compliance violations, or code that might lead to security vulnerabilities.
Redact or block if necessary, then pass the final, sanitized content back to the user.
Logging & Observability
Request and response logs are stored with any sensitive content already redacted.
Monitor usage analytics to avoid unexpected costs or rate-limit hits.
6. Key Security & Compliance Features
Dynamic Routing
If your primary model goes down or hits a rate limit, Requesty reroutes traffic to a backup model. Keep your AI workflows online 24/7.
Budget Controls
Limit monthly or daily spending on any given model. Set a threshold—if you approach it, Requesty dynamically switches to more cost-effective alternatives like OpenAI o3 mini.
Granular Logging
Fine-tune the logs you keep. You can log only request metadata (e.g., response times, token counts) while redacting all user input and output.
Evals & Feedback
For every request, gather structured metrics on model performance, cost, latency, or guardrail triggers. Over time, you’ll see patterns and can refine your routing or guardrail rules.
7. Putting It All Together: Secure AI at Scale
By combining smart routing with advanced guardrails and robust logging, Requesty gives you the best of both worlds:
High Reliability: Minimize downtime through multi-provider fallback.
Cost Optimization: Send trivial tasks to cheaper models while reserving premium ones for complex or time-sensitive queries.
Security & Compliance: PII redaction, secret key protection, and optional EU data hosting help meet regulatory demands.
Requesty doesn’t just help you build a single LLM use case—it future-proofs your entire AI strategy, letting you swap or add providers as your needs evolve.
8. Next Steps
Ready to see how Requesty’s guardrails can transform your AI workflows? Here’s how to get started:
Sign Up
Visit requesty.ai to create an account and generate your API keys.
Configure Guardrails
Use the built-in guardrail settings to enable PII redaction and secret key detection.
Set up fallback policies in case your chosen model (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro) goes down.
Integrate with Your Favorite Tools
Quickly add Requesty to platforms like Cline, Roo Code, Aider, OpenWebUI, and LibreChat for code generation or chat management.
Monitor & Iterate
Keep an eye on the cost dashboard and analytics to refine your usage policies, budget thresholds, and compliance checks.
Conclusion
Securing AI applications doesn’t have to be complicated. With Requesty’s advanced guardrails—covering everything from prompt injection checks to PII and secret key redaction—you can confidently deploy any model in your workflow. Best of all, you’ll reduce downtime, control costs, and ensure regulatory compliance with minimal friction.
Ready to level up your AI strategy? Sign up for Requesty today and experience the power of secure, reliable LLM routing—built for the enterprise, designed for the future.