We're Entering the Age of AI Connectivity

How does Kong AI Gateway cover the complete AI data path?

Kong Agent Gateway is a new capability within Kong AI Gateway that extends our platform to more robustly cover agent-to-agent (A2A) communication.

With this release, Kong AI Gateway now natively handles all three patterns of AI traffic in a product that is already being used by some of the largest enterprises in the world to govern real, production AI workloads. As of 3.14, Kong AI Gateway can be implemented as an:

• LLM Gateway: Manage, secure, and optimize traffic between your applications and large language models
• MCP Gateway: Govern access to MCP servers, tools, and data sources via the Model Context Protocol
• Agent Gateway: Control and observe agent-to-agent communication over the A2A protocol

Combined with Kong's API Management and Event Management capabilities, you now have a single governance layer across the entire stack — APIs, events, LLM calls, MCP tool access, and A2A communication. We call this the full AI data path, and no other vendor covers it.

Why is AI governance for agent-to-agent communication critical right now?

Yes, A2A is still early. The protocol launched in April 2024, backed by Google, but enterprise adoption is now accelerating fast given the pressures to start innovating with agentic AI.

Organizations that are serious about moving agentic workloads into production are already hitting many of the same walls they hit when trying to hardwire apps to LLMs: how do you govern communication agent-to-agent communication between agents you didn't hand-wire together?

Without A2A governance, enterprises are stuck choosing between stitching together point solutions, building custom proxies, or accepting blind spots in their AI infrastructure. These blind spots in agentic architectures are particularly dangerous, as they can lead to rogue agents consuming massive token budgets or leaking sensitive enterprise data across unauthorized boundaries. None of those options scale, and none of them help you avoid the security pitfalls that will kill agentic AI velocity.

And as Gartner put it in the Emerging Tech Adoption Radar 2026 :

"Discoverability, negotiation and transaction between agent-to-agent (A2A) counterparts represent the next horizon — an emerging class of differentiated features for AI gateways."

Gartner

Emerging Tech Adoption Radar 2026: Accelerating AI Transformation

But Gartner goes even further, noting that AI gateways and agent management platforms together "form the backbone of safe and scalable AI adoption" and help organizations contain agent sprawl. Kong Agent Gateway is designed to be exactly that backbone for enterprise AI governance. And it’s now a core part of the larger Kong Konnect platform as an agent management platform, making it a leading choice when conducting an enterprise AI governance platform comparison.

What are the capabilities of Agent Gateway?

Platform and infrastructure teams can define global policies that govern which agents can communicate with each other, what data can flow between them, and how every interaction is logged. Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Agent identity & authentication: Verify and enforce identity for every agent in your workflows, so only authorized agents can initiate or participate in A2A communication.
• Unified observability: observe LLM calls, MCP tool invocations, and A2A communication
• Real-time traffic inspection: Inspect agent-to-agent message content in flight to detect policy violations, prompt injection attempts, and anomalous behavior before they propagate.
• Cost allocation by agent: Track token consumption and resource usage at the agent level, so you can attribute costs accurately and optimize margins across your agentic applications.
• Full audit logging: Capture a complete record of every agent-to-agent conversation for regulatory compliance, internal governance, and incident response.

See Agent Gateway in action with a real multi-agent architecture

When we build Agentic AI infra, we test it on real agents. If you're looking for real-world agentic architectures examples, check out the video below that shows Kong Agent Gateway (along with the rest of the Kong platform, including Event Gateway) being used to govern real-time multi-agent communication as a part of a larger Agent, Orchestrator, and subagent pattern.

How to govern your complete multi-agent architecture

Remember to think about more than just native AI traffic.

As massive as the Agent Gateway is, A2A communication is just one part of the larger AI data path. When planning out your multi-agent strategies, make sure that you have plans to govern the entirety of the intelligence (LLMs) and context (MCP, APIs, events, data, other agents) surface that your Agents will need to traverse. If you’re interested in how to combine Agent Gateway with other parts of the Kong platform, we recommend checking out the following resources:

• For MCP governance: Learn how to use Kong MCP Gateway to govern creation and usage of MCP servers and Kong MCP registry to govern how MCP servers are discovered and consumed
• For API governance: Learn how to use Kong API Gateway to govern all API consumption across the enterprise…including agent consumption of APIs
• For more advanced Agent context orchestration and delivery: Learn more about early access to Kong Context Mesh, which is already becoming the foundation for enterprise agentic integration

Get started today

Kong Agent Gateway is available now for all Kong Konnect customers as part of Kong AI Gateway. If you're already using Kong API Gateway and/or AI Gateway for API and LLM traffic, you already have a natural path to Agent Gateway as your agentic workloads mature.

Learn more and get started at konghq.com/ai-gateway.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the A2A protocol?
The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol is an emerging standard launched in April 2024 (backed by Google) that allows autonomous AI agents to discover, negotiate, and transact with one another. It provides a standardized framework for agents to share context and delegate tasks without requiring human-in-the-loop intervention or manual hardwiring by developers.

How does Kong Agent Gateway compare to OpenAI Gateway?
While tools like the OpenAI Gateway are excellent for managing linear traffic to specific LLM models, Kong Agent Gateway is designed to govern the entire AI data path. This means Kong doesn't just manage LLM traffic; it also secures agent-to-agent (A2A) communication, governs Model Context Protocol (MCP) server access, and integrates with your existing APIs and event streams—making it a more comprehensive enterprise AI governance platform.

How do I prevent prompt injection between AI agents?
To prevent prompt injection in multi-agent systems, you need a governance layer capable of real-time traffic inspection. An Agent Gateway sits between communicating agents to inspect message content in flight. It evaluates the data being passed via the A2A protocol and blocks malicious payloads, prompt injection attempts, or policy violations before they can propagate to other agents or LLMs.

How can I track token costs per AI agent?
Tracking costs in a multi-agent architecture requires an AI gateway that supports cost allocation by agent identity. Kong Agent Gateway authenticates every agent participating in a workflow and tracks its specific token consumption and resource usage. This allows platform teams to allocate costs accurately per AI agent, rather than just seeing a massive, undifferentiated bill from an LLM provider.

What are the best AI governance tools for multi-agent systems?
The best AI governance tools for multi-agent systems must handle more than just LLM rate limiting. A complete solution requires an LLM Gateway for model traffic, an MCP Gateway for tool and data source access, and an Agent Gateway to secure the A2A protocol. Platforms like Kong Konnect combine these elements to provide unified observability, identity enforcement, and audit logging across the full AI data path.