Where Salus sits

Every protected AI interaction takes one of two shapes. Either there is a cooperating component in the request path, your application, your service, your AI gateway, that can hand the request to Salus deliberately. Or there is not, and Salus has to be inserted around the usage without the application’s cooperation.

Ownership only predicts the answer. You may own an application and still choose the endpoint path because changing it is expensive, or not own the application but control a gateway in front of it that can call Salus.

Integrated: Salus in your stack

When the answer is yes, your code or your gateway calls Salus locally. Salus runs inside your environment as a set of containers behind one gateway service; it is not a hosted service and it never becomes a cloud hop.

• Direct API. Your application calls POST /v1/detect/text before the provider call and POST /v1/recover/text after it. Documents go through POST /v1/detect/file. The API reference has the shapes.
• Your AI gateway. If you run LiteLLM, Salus plugs in as a Generic Guardrail on the pre-call and post-call hooks, streaming included. Your gateway keeps authentication, provider routing, credentials and model selection. See LiteLLM guardrail.

Identity is consistent across a workload. A context_id spans a conversation, a case or a batch run, and within it the same person is the same token in every call.

Endpoint: Salus on managed devices

When the answer is no, browser AI, desktop AI clients, specialist tools whose vendors will not add an integration, Salus is deployed on the device. What is typed or attached is protected before it leaves, and the answer is restored on the way back. The Endpoints chapter covers what IT and security teams should expect.

Side by side

	Integrated	Endpoint
The situation	A component you control is in the request path	The application cannot be changed
Who does the work	Your application or gateway calls Salus	Salus protects on the device
Typical surfaces	In-house apps, services, analytics, agents, your gateway	Browser AI, desktop AI apps, specialist tools
Who adopts it	Engineering and AI platform teams	Security, IT and endpoint teams
Engine, tokens, contexts, rules	Shared	Shared

What Salus does not decide

Salus does not decide which provider a request goes to, and it does not decide whether a request may leave at all. Your gateway decides where. Your DLP decides whether. Salus changes the form of what leaves so that what reaches the model is safe to send, and works alongside both.