Identity & Security
Budget cap (hard cap)
A spending limit enforced before a call is sent, not an alert fired after. When the cap is reached, the next call is refused — no spend occurs. A hard cap is a circuit breaker; an alert is a smoke detector that may or may not wake anyone.
Example
A key has a $500 hard cap. A runaway loop tries to spend $34,000 overnight. At $500 the gateway returns a refusal (an HTTP 402) before forwarding the call to the provider, so the loop stops at $500 instead of $34,000.
This is a Tokenality concept. See how it works in the product overview or the live playground.
Related terms
Virtual AI Key
A governed stand-in for a raw provider API key: a key you issue per team, person, project, or agent that carries its own budget, its own limits, and full attribution — while the real provider key stays hidden. The concept mirrors the virtual credit card, where each card has its own limit and owner. (In Tokenality these are issued as tk_live_… keys.)
AI gateway
A single point that all AI traffic passes through on its way to the providers — the place where keys are resolved, budgets are checked, calls are logged, and policies are enforced. It's the choke point that makes control possible, because everything flows through it.
Anomaly detection
Watching spend or usage for sudden deviations from the normal pattern and flagging them the instant they happen, so a spike is caught on the request path rather than in next month's report.
Spend control plane
The layer that governs AI spend across an organization: it issues virtual keys, enforces budgets before calls, attributes every dollar, and produces the audit record. "Observability" tells you what you spent; a control plane decides whether you spend it — the enforcement happens before the call, not after. (This is Tokenality's category.)