AI Runtime Protection
The riskiest parts of an AI application isn’t text generation - it’s tool execution and data management. Arcjet helps protect AI applications by providing guardrails across the entire AI lifecycle, using real application context (identity, route, session, cost budgets), not just prompt content.
Production AI failures follow three patterns:
- Cost explosion. Automated traffic, user abuse, and prompt attacks inflate token and tool spend. Risky for providers and users.
- Unauthorized side-effects. Agents invoke tools in ways they shouldn’t - issuing refunds, accessing data, escalating privileges. The prompt can be benign; the tool call is catastrophic.
- Data exfiltration. Sensitive data leaks into logs, third-party contexts, or model memory through tool outputs and unguarded responses.
Arcjet’s core features map directly onto these problems.
AI abuse protection
Section titled “AI abuse protection”Building block: Bot detection
Block automated clients before they reach your AI provider. Arcjet lets you deny all automated traffic - or selectively allow uptime monitors, link previewers, and other trusted clients.
AI budget control
Section titled “AI budget control”Building block: Token bucket rate limiting
Enforce per-user token quotas to prevent cost explosions. Dynamically link user quotas to rate limits tracked by tokens.
AI data loss prevention
Section titled “AI data loss prevention”Building blocks: Sensitive information detection
Prevent PII and sensitive data from leaking into AI model context, logs, or third-party tool calls. Arcjet detects card numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, and custom patterns in request bodies - entirely locally, with no data leaving your infrastructure.
Quick start
Section titled “Quick start”The fastest way to get started is the get started guide, which walks through protecting an AI chat application with bot detection and per-user token budgets.