Vercel AI Gateway is a single API endpoint for hundreds of AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXAI, open-source providers and more. One API key replaces many provider accounts, and tokens are billed at provider prices with no markup. If a provider degrades, the gateway fails over to the same model on another provider, and routing can be tuned for availability, cost or latency. Text, image, video, realtime, speech, transcription, embeddings and reranking models are all reachable through it, with unified billing and observability in one dashboard.
The gateway is for developers and engineering teams building AI features or agents, especially those who already deploy on Vercel or use the AI SDK in TypeScript or Python. Startups that want to try new models the day they launch avoid juggling keys and rate limits. Teams with existing provider contracts can bring their own keys with no platform fee. Security-minded organizations can restrict traffic to approved providers, route only to providers under Zero Data Retention agreements, and require that prompts are never used for training, configured per request or team-wide.
Typical workflows include moving an existing OpenAI or Anthropic SDK integration over by changing the base URL, then switching models by editing a model string instead of rewriting code. Teams send everyday requests to a cost-efficient open model and escalate to a frontier model only for complex jobs. Latency-sensitive features route to the fastest responder for the lowest time to first token. Coding agents and command-line tools can point at the gateway, and agent tools such as search and fetch are added through the same account. One customer, Zo Computer, reported a 20x improvement in AI reliability after switching.
