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In one of our posts, Kong AI/MCP Gateway and Kong MCP Server technical breakdown, we described the new capabilities added to Kong AI Gateway to support MCP (Model Context Protocol). The post focused exclusively on consuming MCP server and MCP tools through Kong MCP Gateway. Now, it's time to check how an AI agent can leverage the AI and MCP infrastructure exposed and protected by Kong AI/MCP Gateway.

If your 2026 resolution is to finally get AI costs under control, we've got you covered. Every January, the same resolutions show up: eat better, exercise more, finally learn that language, finally figure out that production use case for AI agents (OK, this one isn’t so typical unless you operate in our universe). But if you're responsible for your organization's AI strategy, we'd like to suggest a different one for 2026: stop letting AI be a cost center.

API endpoints process requests that power our digital world—from social feeds updating in real-time to enterprise systems syncing global inventories across continents. APIs comprise over 57% of Internet traffic, yet API endpoints often remain misunderstood. This leads to design inconsistencies, brittle integrations, and costly maintenance issues. Sound familiar? If you've merged microservices and untangled mismatched status codes, you know the pain.

While AI is revolutionizing the future of nearly every industry, it’s also created a unique set of challenges and liabilities that will need to be addressed as the area grows. Enter AI governance: a set of rules and best practices to ensure that AI is used effectively, securely, and responsibly. But what exactly does that mean, and why is it so crucial for businesses?

Another year is wrapping up, and we’re taking a moment to reflect on what made 2025 a defining year for Kong. With major advances in building the AI connectivity layer and soaring enterprise adoption of agentic systems, this year sparked a hockey-stick surge in demand for the infrastructure that powers intelligent agents. Below is a rundown on the updates, the innovations, and the moments that moved the industry in one year-end recap.

Happy holidays from the Kong team! Consider this our gift to everyone who's been asked "what's the ROI on AI?" one too many times. The AI boom has a dirty secret: for most enterprises, it's bleeding money. Every LLM call, every agent invocation, every API request that powers your AI products — they all cost something. And right now, most organizations have no idea what they're spending, who's spending it, or how to control that spend. Finance teams are flying blind.

Discover expanded OpenTelemetry support, full cloud-native authentication, powerful Datakit orchestrations, and PCI DSS 4.0 attestation for Kong Konnect and Cloud Gateways. As API ecosystems grow more complex, maintaining visibility and security shouldn't be a hurdle. Kong Gateway 3.13 simplifies these challenges with expanded OpenTelemetry support and more flexible orchestration. These new capabilities not only make your APIs more observable but also make it easier to implement orchestration.

Kong was born to connect. The world is shifting from connecting cloud services with apps to connecting LLMs through agents. API calls and tokens are moving in tandem; a new unit of intelligence is forming. As AI traffic explodes into hypervolumes, speed is all that matters. The same principles of performance, security, and reliability behind Kong are essential in an agentic world. A new connectivity layer for AI is born.

Kong AI Gateway 3.13 moves enterprises from AI experimentation to shipping production-grade agents by unlocking new capabilities focused on agentic security, developer productivity, and resilience, including MCP tool-level access control, expanded provider support, and smarter load balancing.

We’re thrilled to share that Kong Konnect, our unified API and AI platform, has been named a winner of Foundry Co.'s InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards 2025 in the API Management category. InfoWorld’s annual awards recognize the most innovative software development, DevOps, cloud, data management, and AI/ML products on the information technology landscape.