Making Claude Code work for enterprise-scale use with an AI Gateway

Claude Code is quite popular amongst developers, especially those working on code-heavy tasks or agentic workflows. Its ability to understand, explain, and generate high-quality code makes it a natural fit in enterprise dev environments.

But, Claude Code is optimized for individual productivity and not for secure, governed, organization-wide deployment.

Once teams start adopting it at scale, questions quickly surface:
Who’s using it? How much is it costing us? Are we enforcing the right access controls? Can we track and audit every interaction?

These are more than fringe concerns for any enterprise rolling out AI.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the common limitations of Claude Code in enterprise environments and show how show how Portkey helps teams can take Claude Code beyond experimentation.

Where Claude Code falls short today

Claude Code is impressive on its own, but once you try to scale its use across an enterprise, it becomes difficult. Here’s where most teams hit friction:

• No built-in logging or traceability: Claude Code doesn’t offer native support for capturing logs, tracking usage by team or user, or auditing what prompts are being run.
  
• No cost tracking or attribution: As usage grows, teams quickly lose sight of who’s consuming tokens and driving up bills. Without metadata-based logging or budget controls, cost management becomes guesswork.
  
• Limited support for org-wide policy enforcement: There’s no way to set rules like rate limits, input validations, or output filters without building custom wrappers around the API.
  
• Lack of team-based access control: You can’t easily restrict access by user, team, or role—every integration essentially starts from scratch.
  
• Single-provider limitations: If you're using Claude via Anthropic, you're locked into that route. Switching between Anthropic, Bedrock, or Vertex AI requires manual reconfiguration.

In short, Claude Code is great at code generation and reasoning, but needs the operational scaffolding enterprises need for safe, efficient, and scalable deployment.

That’s where a unified AI gateway like Portkey fills the gap.

How Portkey helps operationalize Claude Code for enterprises

Portkey acts as a unified AI gateway that wraps Claude Code with the control, reliability, and visibility features enterprises need, without changing how developers interact with the model.

Here’s how it helps:

• Unified AI Gateway: With Portkey, you can route Claude Code through any of its supported providers, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, or Vertex AI. This gives you the flexibility to choose based on latency, region, cost, or reliability.
  
• Cost tracking and attribution: Portkey logs token usage and cost per request, broken down by user, team, route, or project. This gives you full visibility into where spend is happening—and lets you set usage-based alerts, apply budget limits, or optimize routing to reduce costs.
  
• Centralized Logging & Observability: Every request to Claude Code is automatically logged, along with metadata like route, user ID, timestamps, and response times. You get full visibility into prompt activity, usage spikes, errors, and performance bottlenecks, all in one place.
  
• Security & Governance Layer
  Portkey lets you implement enterprise-grade controls:
  - Rate limits per user, team, or route
  - Access controls based on roles, teams, or API keys
  
• Guardrails to validate inputs and outputs (e.g., regex filters, prompt length limits, token safety)
  
• Audit trails for every call, critical for compliance in regulated industries
  
• Team-based access control: Define which teams or roles can access Claude Code, and what they can do with it. For example, allow product teams to use code explanations but restrict direct code generation to engineering leads.
  
• Centralized policy management: Set consistent rules across the org, like maximum prompt length, banned keywords, or approved models. Apply them at the gateway level, so policies are enforced no matter where the request originates.
  
• Usage monitoring and alerts: Track who’s using Claude Code, how often, and for what. Set alerts for anomalies like sudden traffic spikes, repeated errors, or budget thresholds being crossed.

In short, Portkey turns Claude Code from a powerful API into an enterprise-ready capability, ready for production workloads.

Go beyond experimentation

By routing Claude Code through Portkey’s AI gateway, enterprises gain the controls they need to confidently roll out AI-powered development workflows. You get the flexibility to switch providers, the visibility to monitor every interaction, and the tools to enforce consistent policies across the board.

If you're serious about scaling Claude Code internally without compromising on reliability, security, or performance, Portkey is the missing layer.

Ready to make Claude Code enterprise-ready? Get started with Portkey or book a demo with us.