Safety identifiers

Tag each request with your end user's ID for analytics, budgets, and abuse tracking.

When many of your users share one API key, the gateway and the provider can’t tell them apart unless you say who sent each request. Two fields do that. customer_identifier is read by Respan: it attributes the request to a user so you can see their usage and cap their spend. safety_identifier is OpenAI’s own request field, meant for the provider: it lets the provider track abuse per end user instead of flagging your whole account.

curl https://gateway.respan.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $RESPAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gpt-5.5",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
    "customer_identifier": "user_8f3a",
    "safety_identifier": "user_8f3a"
  }'

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://gateway.respan.ai/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["RESPAN_API_KEY"],
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-5.5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
    safety_identifier="user_8f3a",
    extra_body={"customer_identifier": "user_8f3a"},
)

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  baseURL: "https://gateway.respan.ai/v1",
  apiKey: process.env.RESPAN_API_KEY,
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "gpt-5.5",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello!" }],
  safety_identifier: "user_8f3a",
  // @ts-expect-error Respan parameter
  customer_identifier: "user_8f3a",
});

Use a stable ID that doesn’t reveal who the user is, such as a hashed user ID, not an email address. The same value can go in both fields.

customer_identifier

customer_identifier stays in Respan. With it you can:

• See each user’s requests, tokens, and cost in Observability › Users & identifiers.
• Filter logs and usage reports by user.
• Cap a user’s spend with a budget, or their requests per minute with customer_params.rate_limit. See Budgets and limits.

For realtime sessions, send it in the X-Data-Respan-Params header. See Customers.

safety_identifier

safety_identifier is a field of OpenAI’s request, not a Respan parameter. The gateway doesn’t read it: it travels with the rest of your request body to the provider, like any other OpenAI field. If one of your users sends abusive content, a provider that reads it can act on that user instead of your whole account.

To find a user’s requests in Respan, for example after a provider flags them, use customer_identifier, which Respan stores on every log.

Next steps

• Customers
• Budgets and limits
• Data retention and ZDR