F5 AI Gateway: Govern, Secure, Optimize AI
Every Model. Every Agent. Every Tool. Governed.
F5 AI Gateway provides a single control plane to secure, control, and optimize every AI interaction. Unifying a Model Gateway, MCP Gateway, and AI Guardrails under one control plane and policy model, it reduces token spend by 30–60%, enforces guardrail policies, and governs agent-to-tool access with full auditability—with no application changes required.
Reduce AI Spend by 30–60%
Cut token costs with smart routing, caching, and budget enforcement—no app changes.
Protect AI Data & Prove Compliance
Enforce guardrails to block prompt injection, redact PII, and prove compliance.
Govern Agents & Control Tool Access
Govern every agent and tool through a central registry with full audit trails.
Simplify AI Ops & Consolidate Tools
Eliminate sprawl: Unify App, API & AI delivery, security and observability.
Benefits
Reduce AI Spend
Cut Token Costs 30–60% With No App Changes
- Token metering and per-team budgets deliver full cost visibility and granular attribution across every dimension—provider, model, team, and individual user—so leadership always knows exactly where AI spend is going and can set enforceable spending limits.
- Semantic caching, smart routing, and GPU-aware routing intelligently optimize every request, ensuring it reaches the right model at the right cost and lowest latency.
- MCP gateway eliminates redundant agentic tool calls, reducing token waste by up to 90%.
Secure AI interactions
Block Threats, Redact Data, Prove Compliance
- 20+ guardrail policies enforce protection on every prompt and response, with expert-built controls for PII leakage, EU AI Act alignment, PCI, and PHI compliance from day one.
- PII/PHI redaction prevents sensitive data from ever reaching third-party LLMs
- Prompt-injection and jailbreak defense with fail-closed enforcement, backed by F5 Labs' preeminent AI threat library—over 10,000 attack patterns added monthly—ensuring protection outpaces emerging techniques.
- Full audit trails with SOC2/ISO/HIPAA alignment, SIEM export, and data residency controls.
Govern Agents & Tools
Every Agent, MCP Tool and Server Authorized, Registered, Auditable
- MCP Server Registry provides a centralized, single-pane view of every MCP server across your environment—public, remote, and private—so teams can discover and manage available tools easily.
- Per-tool allow/deny lists, access controls, and budgets ensure only authorized users and agents can invoke specific tools, with enforceable spending limits on every call.
- Complete tool-call audit trail captures every invocation with full context, enabling rapid compliance review and forensic investigation.
Simplify AI Operations
One Control Plane to eliminate tool sprawl
- Unifies Model Gateway, MCP Gateway, and AI Guardrails under one policy model and console
- Enforces shared budgets, audit, observability, and RBAC across every AI flow
- Converges delivery and security for apps, APIs, and AI with defense-in-depth that layers load balancing, API gateway, AI Guardrails, WAF, Bot Defense, and DDoS protection
Core capabilities
Model Gateway
Route, cache, and optimize every LLM request
MCP Gateway
Govern every agent-to-tool interaction
AI Asset Registry
Register and manage models and MCP servers
Tool Access Control
RBAC, per-tool access, budgets & quotas
Cost Management
Token metering, budgets, and attribution
Monitoring & Analytics
Dashboards, telemetry, OTEL, SIEM export
AI Guardrails
50+ policies with fail-closed enforcement
Caching
Semantic and exact cache to cut token costs
FAQs
An AI Gateway is a centralized control plane that sits between your users, agents and AI services, providing visibility, governance, and security for all AI interactions. It lets you manage who accesses AI models, enforce security policies, and maintain full auditability across your organization's AI usage.
F5 AI Gateway provides full visibility into token consumption and model spend across teams, helping you identify inefficiencies and set usage policies. It also reduces costs through intelligent caching of repeated queries and automatic routing of requests to the most cost-effective model for each task, so you're not overpaying for simple interactions.
F5 AI Gateway inspects prompts and responses in real time, detecting and blocking sensitive data—like source code, credentials, or customer information—before it ever reaches an external AI model. This ensures your organization can adopt AI tools without risking accidental data exposure.
Yes—F5 AI Gateway is vendor-agnostic, allowing you to route traffic across multiple AI providers and models from a single control point. This gives your teams the flexibility to use the best model for each task without creating security or governance gaps.
F5 AI Gateway gives you a complete audit trail of every AI interaction across your organization, including who made requests, which models were used, what data was exchanged, and how much each interaction costs. This makes it easy to monitor adoption, track spend by team or application, enforce compliance, and investigate incidents.
F5 AI Gateway is architected for high-throughput, low-latency processing, ensuring that security checks, policy enforcement, and routing decisions don't create bottlenecks—even under heavy load. Built-in features like load balancing, failover across models, and intelligent caching help maintain performance and reliability as your AI usage grows.