What is an AI Interaction Firewall?
Your people paste contracts, source code and customer data into public AI tools every day — every prompt a potential leak. An AI Interaction Firewall is the control plane that decides, per prompt, what may leave the building.
- Built for GDPR & the EU AI Act
- Fully on-prem capable
- Sovereign by design
An AI Interaction Firewall is a control plane that sits between an organization's users and any AI model — local or cloud — and inspects every prompt and response in real time to classify it, strip or redact sensitive data, route it to the right model, and produce an audit trail.
Classify
Every prompt is inspected on the language and intent level — not the network level — and labelled by sensitivity before it reaches a model.
Real-time, inline
Protect
Confidential entities — names, contracts, source code, patient data — are redacted or tokenized so they never leave the organization's perimeter in clear text.
No raw PII to cloud
Route
Each request is sent to the right place: a local model on owned hardware, a sanctioned cloud model, or blocked outright — by policy, per prompt.
local · cloud · hybrid
Audit
Every interaction is logged in a tamper-evident record — supporting EU AI Act Art. 12 record-keeping — so compliance can answer one question: what did our people send to AI, and what came back?
Tamper-evident log
An AI Interaction Firewall is not an “AI firewall”
They share a name and solve opposite problems. One keeps attackers out of your AI. The other keeps your data out of theirs.
Inbound · protects the model
AI Security Firewall
Blocks prompt injection, jailbreaks and abuse aimed at your AI application. The job is to stop attackers from manipulating the model. Established players include Cloudflare, Palo Alto, Akamai and SentinelOne.
Outbound · protects your data
AI Interaction Firewall
Classifies, redacts and routes what your own people send to AI, so confidential data never leaves the perimeter unintentionally. The job is governance and sovereignty — not threat defense.
Where it sits in your stack
Adjacent categories solve adjacent problems — and this is where each one stops.
| AI Interaction Firewall | AI Gateway | AI Security Firewall | Legacy DLP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Govern what your people send to AI | Route & meter API traffic to models | Block attacks against your AI app | Stop file/email exfiltration |
| Direction of protection | Outbound (your data) | Throughput | Inbound (attackers) | Outbound (files) |
| Understands prompts & responses | Yes — semantic | Partial — routing only | Yes — threat-focused | No — pattern/regex |
| Redacts sensitive data in-prompt | Yes | No | Rarely | No (blocks, not redacts) |
| Routes between local & cloud models | Yes — per policy | Yes — by config | No | No |
| Runs fully on-premise | Yes — optional | Usually SaaS | Usually SaaS | On-prem or SaaS |
| Audit trail of AI usage | Yes — tamper-evident | Usage logs | Security events | File events |
Common questions
- Is an AI Interaction Firewall the same as an AI firewall?
- No. The common 'AI firewall' or 'LLM firewall' protects your AI application from attackers — prompt injection, jailbreaks, model abuse (inbound). An AI Interaction Firewall protects your organization's data from leaking into the AI (outbound): it classifies, redacts and routes what your people send. They solve opposite problems and are complementary.
- How is it different from an AI gateway?
- An AI gateway routes and meters API traffic to models — a throughput and cost concern. An AI Interaction Firewall makes a governance decision on the content of each prompt and response: classify it, strip the sensitive parts, and decide whether it may leave the building at all.
- Why not just use my existing DLP?
- Legacy DLP inspects files and emails with patterns and regex. It does not understand a free-text prompt, cannot redact part of one while letting the rest through, and has no concept of routing a request to a local versus a cloud model. AI interactions are a new egress path DLP was never built for.
- Can it run without sending anything to the cloud?
- Yes. A complete AI Interaction Firewall can run fully on-premise on owned, certified hardware, with cloud models as an optional, policy-gated destination rather than the default.
- Is there a reference implementation?
- BRANE by AI-Z Group is the reference implementation of the AI Interaction Firewall — classify, protect, route and audit, on local, cloud or hybrid infrastructure.
The AI Interaction Firewall category is stewarded by AI-Z Group and implemented in BRANE — grounded in a documented architecture, the Cognitive Perimeter.
The reference implementation
BRANE is the AI Interaction Firewall, made real.
Classify, protect, route and audit every prompt — on local, cloud or hybrid infrastructure, on your own certified hardware.