Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

We're pulling back the curtain on a project we've been working on for some time now: the next evolution of the Kong brand. You may have noticed some changes recently to our site, swag, or socials. But today it's official: we're announcing Kong's rebrand and introducing our new mascot, Karl. Without further ado, let's dig in. Along the way, we'll give some insight into the "why" behind it all, while looking back at how things have changed since the early days of Kong. We were the API connectivity company.

Kong AI Gateway already gives platform teams a central place to route, observe, and enforce policy across AI traffic. Security teams working alongside those platform teams often need another set of answers: Which agents are connected? Which attack paths actually succeed against them? What happened across the full session or tool chain? And if an agent is compromised, can its next action be stopped before it reaches an enterprise system? The integration is designed to be complementary.

Kong is named **a Leader** in *The Forrester Wave: API Management Software, Q3 2026*. APIs used to be about connecting systems to each other. Now they're also how AI agents connect to everything: tools, data, other agents. That shift changes what good API management looks like, and it's where we at Kong have shifted our focus. Forrester's take on where we land.

We said you'd see the evidence quickly.. Here it is. **Kong AI Gateway 2.0 is now generally available**, and it isn't arriving quietly.