An AI Gateway for Research Labs

Since September 2026 UC Riverside (UCR) Research Computing has run a pilot AI gateway: one web address and one personal key that reach Google's Gemini models, partner and open-weight models hosted on Google Vertex AI, and open models on the National Research Platform. It is a proof of concept. As of 23 October it served 34 model deployments to 13 keys, including three pilot labs. It runs the open-source LiteLLM proxy, v1.104.0, on Google Cloud Run, with a small admin server I call aigw in front that turns the proxy's teams and keys into labs, members and allowances. Two lessons carry over to anyone building one. First, keep the admin layer out of the request path and let the proxy enforce limits, so a bug in your own code cannot spend money; but know that the proxy's budgets are checked before each call and can be overshot. Second, probe the real system before trusting a setting's name. A wildcard, a "disabled" console and a test fake each did something other than their label. Field Notes technical report. Web edition: https://charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/2026-10-29-an-ai-gateway-for-research-labs.html. This record holds the PDF (ACM sigconf, PDF/A-2b) and the LaTeX source.