Announcing Kong AI Gateway 2.0: Built for the Pace of Agentic AI

Kong announced AI Gateway 2.0, a standalone product decoupled from its API Gateway to keep pace with the fast-moving agentic AI ecosystem. The new version has its own runtime, control plane, and admin API, enabling faster iteration than the conservative release cadence of Kong Gateway 3.x.

Since its launch, Kong AI Gateway has shipped as part of Kong API Gateway. Every AI capability we built LLM routing, prompt guarding, semantic caching, token-based rate limiting rode the same release train as the API gateway that powers some of the largest API platforms in the world. That coupling served customers well when AI traffic was a new workload finding its footing inside existing API infrastructure. However, things have changed a lot over the last three years since we shipped AI Gateway. The agentic AI landscape moves on a clock of weeks, not quarters. New model providers appear, protocols like MCP and A2A evolve mid-flight, and the primitives teams need to govern agent traffic look less and less like the primitives they need to govern REST APIs. Meanwhile, the necessary API gateway release cadence is deliberately more conservative, because that's exactly what mission-critical API infrastructure demands. One codebase simply cannot honor both clocks. So we split them. AI Gateway now has its own runtime, its own control plane, its own admin API, and its own version number — all starting at 2.0. Kong Gateway 3.x continues on its proven, stability-first quarterly cadence. AI Gateway 2.x moves at the speed of the AI ecosystem. The version number signals the break cleanly: going forward, AI Gateway shouldn’t be considered a feature set inside Kong Gateway 3.x. It's a product with its own trajectory.