F5 has introduced significant enhancements to its AI Gateway and integrated the solution into the F5 AI Security Platform, 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.

According to F5’s 2026 State of Application Strategy Report, 77 per cent of organisations say inference, rather than model training or tuning, is now their dominant AI activity, and organisations are managing an average of seven AI models. As inference scales, F5 said tokenomics is becoming an increasingly important consideration, with every model request carrying implications for cost, performance and security.

“We’re watching enterprises race to deploy AI while struggling to control it. Every AI request carries economic, security, and governance implications, yet most organizations are relying on fragmented tools that address only part of the problem. We believe every enterprise will need an intelligent control layer for AI,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5.

Three functions in a single control point

F5 AI Gateway brings together three functions: Model Gateway for model access and cost optimisation, MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool governance, and AI Guardrails for prompt and response protection. Budgets, model routing policies and agent access controls are set once centrally and enforced across distributed environments, giving AI platform, security and finance teams a single operations pane.

• Model Gateway: attributes every token by provider, model, team and user, enforces per-team budgets as spend occurs, and applies smart routing, model tiering, semantic caching and GPU-aware load balancing — designed to cut token spend by up to 60 per cent with no application changes
• MCP Gateway: provides fine-grained access controls limiting agents to explicitly authorised resources, with a complete audit trail and a central MCP server registry
• AI Guardrails: inspects every prompt and response, redacts sensitive data, blocks injection and jailbreak attempts, and fails closed when a request cannot be evaluated, with audit trails aligned to SOC 2, ISO and HIPAA frameworks

Positioned as the enforcement point for AI security

F5 AI Gateway serves as the point where the four pillars of the F5 AI Security Platform — AI governance, AI usage control, AI security testing and AI runtime protection — meet live traffic, putting policy into force at the point of interaction. It is deployable across SaaS, hybrid SaaS and hybrid multicloud environments, with air-gapped support planned for regulated and sovereign use cases.

Citing a recent Gartner report, F5 noted that 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, with adoption expected to continue accelerating among large enterprises.