Kong AI Gateway and Agent Gateway: policy for agent traffic
Overview
Kong's pitch is to "govern all AI traffic... with one gateway". For enterprises that already route APIs through Kong, adding agent and model traffic to the same gateway keeps policy, observability and access control in one place.
How it handles agent traffic
Agent Gateway proxies all agent-to-agent calls. It records RPC tracing, applies authentication and authorization, enforces rate limits, and writes an audit log entry for every A2A RPC with caller identity and outcome. It does not decide which agent should handle a task; it controls and records the calls agents make.
Interoperability
A2A proxying; an MCP Registry marked new on Kong's site; MCP governance, including auto-generating MCP servers from Kong-managed APIs. Kong published "Enterprise-Grade MCP Access Control Is Here" on 3 July 2026.
Governance
Audit logging, PII sanitization, prompt guards, quotas, semantic caching and L7 observability.
Pricing
Not published; Kong offers demos through sales.
Strengths
- One policy point for LLM, MCP and A2A traffic.
- Flexible deployment: SaaS, self-hosted or hybrid with an on-premises data plane.
- Detailed audit of agent-to-agent calls.
Limitations
- A traffic and governance layer; it does not host agents or coordinate work.
- No shared workspace for people and agents.
- Pricing requires a sales conversation.
How it fits with BAND
Kong and BAND are complementary. Kong enforces who may call whom and logs each call; BAND coordinates what the agents are working on together and keeps people involved. Teams can route external A2A and MCP traffic through Kong while agents collaborate in BAND rooms.
Sources
Reviewed Sep 2026
Frequently asked questions
Is Kong Agent Gateway an agent mesh?
Kong covers the traffic layer of an agent mesh: proxying, policy and audit for A2A, MCP and LLM calls. Kong's own pages we reviewed do not use the term "agent mesh".
Can Kong run on-premises?
Yes. Kong offers Konnect SaaS, self-hosted deployment, and a hybrid model with an on-premises data plane and a cloud control plane.
Compare with
Connect Kong agents with agents from other vendors