Rate limiting
Also called Rate Limiting
Capping how many requests someone can make in a window, to blunt abuse, runaway costs, and attacks.
Think of it like
A turnstile that only lets so many people through per minute, so no one can rush the gate.
Example
An API returns "429 Too Many Requests" after a script tries 10,000 generations in a minute, throttling a scraping or brute-force attempt.
How it actually works
Limits are set per key, user, or IP and enforced with algorithms like token bucket or sliding window. Beyond fairness and cost control, rate limiting slows brute-force jailbreak search and automated abuse by making each attempt cost time. It is a blunt but reliable safety and reliability primitive.
For product teams
A simple lever that protects cost, reliability, and safety all at once.
For engineers
Enforce per-identity quotas via token-bucket/sliding-window; it also raises the cost of automated jailbreak and abuse campaigns.
Related
- Abuse prevention — A core mechanism of abuse prevention.
- Jailbreak resistance — Raises the cost of automated attacks against jailbreak resistance.
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