AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Every organisation has a policy for what AI should and shouldn't do. But in the era of autonomous agents, who is that document actually for? Odds are no agent has ever read it. It opens a connection and makes a call, and whatever happens at that millisecond is your real policy. So put the control there. This talk is about the gateway as the runtime where AI governance actually executes: per-agent identity and scoped, short-lived credentials instead of a shared god-key. PII and secrets stripped from prompts in flight. Token-aware rate limits so one looping agent can't torch your quota. Semantic caching that cuts spend and latency on requests you've already answered. I'll share the architectural patterns behind each control, what they look like in practice, and what breaks the moment you take them away. Policy states intent. Infrastructure enforces it.