Level 2: Basics

Starter Tier Features

Unlock advanced protection with Red Team testing, injection defense, cost optimization, and Trust Score badges. This module covers the premium features that make Starter tier essential for production deployments.

30 minutes

7 sections

Intermediate

Advanced Injection Defense

While Free tier detects injection attempts, Starter tier adds active defense mechanisms:

Automatic blocking: Stop detected injections before they reach your LLM (Proxy Mode only)
Prompt sanitization: Strip suspicious patterns while preserving intent
Context-aware detection: ML classifier trained on adversarial datasets
Custom blocking rules: Define your own threat signatures

How Auto-Blocking Works

When Proxy Mode detects an injection with confidence > 85%, it returns a safe error response instead of forwarding to the LLM. You can configure this threshold in Gateway settings.

Red Team Engine

The Red Team Engine runs automated adversarial tests against your agents to find vulnerabilities before attackers do.

What is Red Teaming?

Red teaming simulates real attacks to test your defenses. AAIS includes a library of injection patterns, jailbreak techniques, and data extraction attempts.

Running Your First Campaign

Navigate to Attack Playground in the sidebar
Select your target agent from the dropdown
Choose attack categories (injection, jailbreak, PII extraction)
Click Run Campaign
Review results and remediation recommendations

Red Team Best Practices

Run campaigns weekly during development and monthly in production. Always test against a staging environment first to avoid triggering rate limits or unexpected behavior.

Trust Score Badges

Build user confidence by embedding real-time Trust Score badges on your website or product.

Generating an Embeddable Badge

Go to Trust Scores page
Select an agent
Click Generate Badge
Copy the HTML snippet or direct image URL
Embed on your landing page or product dashboard

<!-- Embeddable Trust Score Badge -->
<img src="https://agentaishield.com/api/v1/badge/agent/my-chatbot"
     alt="Trust Score: A+"
     style="height: 32px;" />

The badge updates in real-time and displays the current letter grade (A+ to F). Users can click it to view a public verification page with detailed security posture.

Marketing with Trust

Trust badges increase conversion rates by 20-30% for AI-powered products. Display them prominently on pricing pages, product tours, and checkout flows.

Cost Arbitrage Engine

Save 30-40% on LLM costs by automatically routing requests to cheaper providers when quality requirements are met.

How It Works

You define quality thresholds (e.g., "acceptable for simple questions")
AAIS analyzes each request's complexity
Simple queries route to cheaper models (GPT-3.5, Claude Haiku)
Complex queries route to premium models (GPT-4, Claude Opus)

Setting Up Budget Controls

Navigate to Data Shield (Configuration section)
Click Cost Optimization tab
Set monthly budget cap ($100, $500, $1000, etc.)
Define routing rules (simple → cheap, complex → premium)
Enable alerting when approaching 80% of budget

Cost Savings Calculator

Visit the pricing page to use the interactive cost savings calculator. Input your monthly request volume, current model, and target model to see projected arbitrage savings. Most customers save 30-40% on LLM costs after enabling intelligent routing.

ROI Example

A customer support bot handling 100K requests/month saved $2,400/mo by routing 60% of simple questions to GPT-3.5 instead of GPT-4. The cost arbitrage engine paid for itself 24x.

90-Day Data Retention

Starter tier extends retention from 30 days (Free) to 90 days, giving you:

Historical trend analysis: Track agent behavior over quarters
Compliance windows: Meet audit requirements for regulated industries
Debugging old issues: Investigate bugs reported weeks ago
Training data collection: Build datasets for fine-tuning

Retention vs Privacy

AAIS automatically redacts detected PII from stored logs. You can configure custom redaction rules in Data Shield settings. For longer retention, upgrade to Enterprise (unlimited).

Email Support

Starter tier includes guaranteed email support with:

24-hour response SLA (business days)
Priority queue — your tickets jump ahead of community support
Expert troubleshooting — security engineers, not chatbots
Integration assistance — help with SDK setup and custom deployments

Contact support at [email protected] or via the in-app chat widget.

Setting Up Alerts and Notifications

Get notified when threats are detected or agents behave abnormally.

Webhook Integration

AAIS can POST events to your webhook endpoints (Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, custom):

Go to Webhooks in the sidebar
Click Add Webhook
Enter endpoint URL and select events (threat detected, trust score drop, budget alert)
Test the webhook and save

{
  "event": "threat.detected",
  "agent_id": "my-chatbot",
  "threat_type": "prompt_injection",
  "confidence": 0.92,
  "timestamp": "2026-02-25T19:30:00Z",
  "request_id": "req_abc123"
}

Email Digests

Receive daily or weekly summaries of agent activity:

Request volume trends
Top threats detected
Trust score changes
Cost breakdowns

Starter Tier Unlocked!

You now have access to production-grade security features. Ready for enterprise deployments? Check out the Enterprise tier module or dive into Advanced Security concepts.

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