F5 has unveiled major enhancements to its AI Gateway, now incorporated into the F5 AI Security Platform, aimed at ensuring efficient governance and economic optimization of AI operations at scale.
The upgraded AI Gateway empowers enterprises with a unified control plane, facilitating consistent access and usage policies, crucial as organizations move past AI experimentation into broader application. Traditional governance methods have not kept up, leaving AI traffic managed by disparate proxies and monitoring tools without integrated guardrails.
Unified Control Plane
The 2026 State of Application Strategy Report by F5 indicates that 77% of organizations prioritize inference over model training or tuning, managing an average of seven AI models. The necessity for tokenomics is growing as AI inference activity expands, highlighting considerations around cost, performance, and security. However, current standalone tools hinder consistent AI traffic control, posing challenges for model and agent management.
The upgraded AI Gateway empowers enterprises with a unified control plane
"We're watching enterprises race to deploy AI while struggling to control it," commented Kunal Anand, F5's Chief Product Officer. He noted, "Every AI request carries economic, security, and governance implications, yet most organizations rely on fragmented tools that address only part of the problem. The result is rising costs, increased risk, and operational complexity." Integrating the F5 AI Gateway into the AI Security Platform provides a central management point for AI models, clouds, agents, and applications, promoting innovation while ensuring visibility and control.
Integrated Solution
The F5 AI Gateway merges three essential functions: Model Gateway for model access and cost optimization, MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool governance, and AI Guardrails for prompt and response protection.
Centralized setting of budgets, model routing policies, and agent access controls are enforced across distributed environments, offering a comprehensive operational view for AI platform ops, AI Security ops, and finance teams. Quickening AI adoption demands such robust AI gateways, with Gartner® identifying their critical importance in facilitating secure and controlled AI access.
Fine-Grained Access Controls
F5 AI Gateway equips organizations with tools to understand tokenomics
F5 AI Gateway equips organizations with tools to understand tokenomics, attributing tokens by provider, model, team, and user. The gateway enforces budget limits in real-time, with automated optimization methods—smart routing, model tiering, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing—minimizing token expenditures by up to 60% without requiring application changes. As the number of agents and MCP servers expands, F5's solution provides fine-grained access controls, authorizing resources at a granular level.
The AI Guardrails component of the F5 AI Gateway inspects each prompt and response to redact sensitive information, preventing data breaches and injection attempts. Full audit trails, integration with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, data residency controls, and compliance with SOC 2, ISO, and HIPAA frameworks deliver assurance to regulated sectors considering AI deployment.
Deployment Across Environments
Earlier this year, F5 introduced the AI Security Platform, enhancing visibility and control over AI applications, models, agents, and APIs.
It encompasses AI governance, usage control, security testing, and runtime protection, fortifying security as an ongoing process. The F5 AI Gateway, an anchor in this ecosystem, enforces live policy control, determining AI interactions and costs. It is compatible with SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and multicloud environments, with air-gapped support anticipated for regulated applications.
F5, the global pioneer in delivering and securing every app and API, introduces significant enhancements to the F5 AI Gateway and integrated the solution into the F5 AI Security Platform. The enhanced F5 AI Gateway seamlessly enforces policies on every AI request, giving enterprises a unified control plane to govern how AI models, agents, and tools are accessed and used, while optimising the economics of AI at scale.
Enterprises have moved past AI experimentation, but governance has not kept pace. AI traffic still moves through a patchwork of standalone proxies and monitoring tools that were never built for AI, with no guardrails in between.
Unified control plane
According to F5’s 2026 State of Application Strategy Report, 77% of organizations say inference, rather than model training or tuning, is now their dominant AI activity, and organizations are managing an average of seven AI models.
As inference scales, tokenomics is becoming an increasingly important consideration, with every model request carrying implications for cost, performance, and security. Yet the piecemeal approach to standalone tools to secure AI traffic leaves enterprises without consistent control over how models and agents are accessed and used.
Customers accelerate innovation
"We're watching enterprises race to deploy AI while struggling to control it," said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5. "Every AI request carries economic, security, and governance implications, yet most organizations are relying on fragmented tools that address only part of the problem. The result is rising costs, increased risk, and operational complexity. F5 AI Gateway, integrated into the F5 AI Security Platform, provides a single control point for managing AI across models, clouds, agents, and applications. We believe every enterprise will need an intelligent control layer for AI. F5 is building that foundation, helping customers accelerate innovation while maintaining visibility, security, and control."
F5 AI Gateway brings three critical functions together in a single integrated solution:
- Model Gateway for model access and cost optimization
- MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool governance
- AI Guardrails for prompt and response protection
Single integrated solution
Budgets, model routing policies and agent access controls are set once centrally and enforced across distributed environments wherever the models, agents and AI apps run, providing a single operations pane for AI platform ops, AI Security ops and finance teams.
Rapid adoption of AI is fueling the need for AI gateways. According to a recent Gartner® report, "AI gateways have emerged as a critical part of AI infrastructure, as enterprises need tools to support safe, efficient and controlled access to AI models and MCP servers. Adoption of AI gateways will continue to accelerate among large enterprises."
Fine-grained access controls
Organizations that cannot see which teams, models, and providers are consuming tokens cannot assess the value and costs of using AI. F5 AI Gateway puts tokenomics under control: the Model Gateway function attributes every token by provider, model, team, and user, per-team budgets enforce limits as spend occurs rather than after the invoice arrives; and automated optimization — smart routing and model tiering, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing — routes each request to the right model at the right cost. The solution is designed to reduce token spend by up to 60 percent, with no application changes.
As agents multiply, so do the MCP servers they call, usually with no central registry, no per-tool authorization, and no record of what agents are doing. The MCP Gateway function of F5 AI Gateway provides fine-grained access controls that limit agents to the resources they are explicitly authorized to use, including APIs, data sources, and RAG systems.
Redacting sensitive data
A complete audit trail captures what was accessed, when, by which agent, and on whose behalf. MCP server registry gives teams a single source of truth for approved MCP servers, thereby removing friction for developers who would otherwise find it challenging to discover which servers and tools exist.
Personal data, health records, and intellectual property move through AI applications every day, and that data usually reaches external models uninspected while injection and jailbreak attempts go undetected. F5 AI Guardrails inspect every prompt and response, redacting sensitive data before it reaches the model, blocking injection and jailbreak attempts, and failing closed when a request cannot be evaluated. Full audit trails, SIEM export, data residency controls, and alignment with SOC 2, ISO, and HIPAA frameworks give regulated industries the evidence they need before putting AI into production.
Hybrid multicloud environments
F5 introduced the F5 AI Security Platform earlier this year to give teams continuous visibility, governance, and protection across enterprise AI applications, models, agents, and the APIs connecting them. Four integrated pillars — AI governance, AI usage control, AI security testing, and AI runtime protection — plus an overarching observability layer, create a persistent security lifecycle rather than a one-time compliance exercise.
F5 AI Gateway is where those pillars meet live traffic, putting policy into force at the point of interaction and controlling what AI can access, what it can expose, and, crucially, what it can cost the business. F5 AI Gateway is deployable across SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and hybrid multicloud environments, with air-gapped support planned for regulated and sovereign use cases.
