Archive
API management products share a feature list and differ in where their planes run, how their policies port and what they can meter. A weighted criteria table, a proof-of-concept plan and a cost model, grounded in the OpenAPI and OAuth specs and OWASP's 2023 API risks, plus the new question of model traffic.
MCP is now stateless. Revision 2026-07-28 removed the initialize handshake and protocol sessions, deprecated sampling and roots, and moved server-to-client requests into retried calls. A section-by-section guide to the current specification, its security rules, its registry and SDKs, and how teams run it in production.
OpenRouter's catalog holds 468 entries under 57 publisher prefixes, but the price next to each name is the price of one endpoint, not of the model. Nineteen leading models compared on published criteria, with picks by job and the routing settings that decide which host, precision and price tier serve a request.
Every major model API now discounts a repeated prompt prefix, but the rules differ on markers, minimum lengths, lifetimes and write surcharges. A provider-by-provider implementation guide with current prices, the usage fields that prove a hit, worked cost examples and the gateway settings that keep a cache warm.
Six algorithms, four places to enforce them, one status code and a draft standard for telling clients how much quota is left. A working reference for rate limiting HTTP APIs, with the request and token limits that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google apply to model traffic.
Shadow AI detection is a data problem before it is a blocking problem. The signal sources that reveal unapproved AI tools, what to log and how long to keep it, how to build an AI inventory that NIST and ISO 42001 would recognise, and how to roll monitoring out through MDM without breaking employee privacy law.
User-Managed Access lets a resource owner decide who else may reach their data, through permission tickets and requesting party tokens. Every identity that grant creates is also a quota key. The protocol, the HTTP signals for throttling, and how both apply to LLM APIs and agents acting for users.
Both protocols now sit under the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, and both shipped major revisions in 2026. Read side by side, the specifications draw a clean line: MCP gives one agent depth, A2A gives a system of agents reach.
An AI agent makes dozens of model and tool calls for one task, and a failure can sit in any of them. Ten observability tools, from gateways that see every call to SDK-based tracing platforms, compared on published criteria and the OpenTelemetry conventions they follow.
AI guardrails now come as gateways, cloud APIs, Python frameworks and small safety models. They differ less in what they detect than in where they sit and what traffic they can see. Nine tools, compared against published criteria, with the gaps each one leaves.
Claude Code is included in every paid Claude plan and can also run on pay-as-you-go API keys, cloud accounts or a gateway. Which credential a developer uses decides which bill a request lands on, and context, caching and model choice decide how large that bill gets.
The phrase now means two things: Anthropic's Claude Security scanner, and the job of keeping a coding agent with shell access from doing harm. Permission modes, the sandbox, managed settings, MCP policy and gateway routing, mapped to the incidents that shaped them.
Claude Code talks to one API format, and anything that speaks that format can answer it. Routers, gateways and local servers use that to swap in other models. The configuration takes minutes; knowing what breaks on the way takes longer.
OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code now cover the same ground, from terminal to IDE to cloud sessions. They still differ on defaults that matter: who sandboxes what, how plans meter usage, what is open source and how an administrator locks a fleet down.
Frontier models now cluster around $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, but batch discounts, cache multipliers, long-context tiers and off-peak clocks move the real bill by an order of magnitude. Every price below comes from the providers' own pricing pages as of October 15, 2026.
OpenRouter made one API key for hundreds of models the default way to prototype. Credit fees, a third party in the data path and governance that lives in someone else's account send production teams looking for alternatives. Seven options, ranked against published criteria.
The 2026 edition of the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications is the first built partly on incident data. It reorders the list, renames one entry and hands agent risks to a separate Agentic Top 10. Each of the ten risks, with documented examples and the layer that can actually enforce its controls.
Provider prompt caches cut the price of a repeated prefix by 90 percent or more but leave output tokens untouched. Semantic caches remove whole calls but can return the wrong answer. The mechanics, prices and failure modes of both, with a worked cost example.
Every major lab, OWASP and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre now say the same thing about prompt injection. Models cannot reliably tell instructions from data, filters miss adaptive attacks, and the defenses that work limit what a manipulated model is able to do.
Running a model on your own hardware is now a configuration problem more than a research one. The hard parts are sizing GPU memory, choosing between Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM and SGLang, reading the licence, and putting a production API in front of a server that was built for one user.