What is an AI permit?

    An AI permit is the decision artifact that says whether an AI request is allowed, under what constraints, and what evidence gets preserved at the boundary.

    Most AI systems still treat the provider call as the primary event. Keel treats the decision before the call as the primary event. That difference sounds small until costs spike, policies drift, or an auditor asks who authorized a request.

    The permit is the primitive

    In the same way a payment system has an authorization step before money moves, Keel has a permit before AI execution moves forward.

    • Databases have queries
    • APIs have requests
    • Keel has permits

    What a permit decides

    1. Is this caller allowed to perform this action?
    2. Do policy and budget rules allow the request right now?
    3. If the request is allowed, what constraints apply?
    4. What record should exist later when someone asks why it happened?

    Why permits matter more than logs

    A log entry tells you a request happened. A permit tells you a governed decision happened before execution. That lets the platform preserve intent, policy context, budget state, constraints, and lineage in one place.

    Where permits fit in different integration modes

    • Permit-first — the application asks Keel for a decision, then executes downstream only if allowed
    • Managed execution — Keel decides, routes, executes, and records the governed path directly

    Both start at the permit boundary. Managed execution carries the strongest execution-side evidence because the system observes more of the downstream path directly.

    Why the permit changes category language

    AI gateways focus on transport. Observability tools focus on what happened after the fact. The permit shifts the category to the decision layer itself. That is why Keel is positioned as an AI control plane rather than as a better proxy.

    What comes after the permit

    Once the permit exists, other product surfaces become easier to explain:

    • cost control because the request can be stopped before spend lands
    • audit evidence because the decision record survives later review
    • comparisons because the build-vs-buy question becomes architectural, not cosmetic

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