agentgateway is an AI-native proxy, written in Rust, for the traffic patterns that agentic systems create: agent-to-LLM, agent-to-tool, and agent-to-agent communication. It speaks the protocols of that world natively — Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) — and layers security, observability, and governance on top, so platform teams can see and control what their agents are actually saying to models and tools.
Created by Solo.io and donated to the Linux Foundation, it slots into the existing cloud native stack rather than beside it: kgateway can act as its control plane, and at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 the Istio project announced experimental agentgateway support alongside its Gateway API Inference Extension work. Capabilities include MCP multiplexing (federating many MCP servers behind one endpoint), tool-level RBAC, prompt guardrails, and OpenTelemetry-based tracing of agent conversations.
It occupies the emerging “agent gateway” niche alongside LiteLLM, Portkey, and the LLM-routing features appearing in traditional API gateways; its bet is that agent traffic deserves a purpose-built, vendor-neutral data plane rather than bolt-ons to HTTP gateways.
