F5 AI Gateway Cuts Enterprise AI Costs by 60% with Unified Control Plane

F5 unleashes next-generation, agentic-ready AI Gateway to optimize the economics and governance of enterprise AI costs

Now part of the F5 AI Security Platform, new capabilities provide a unified control point for AI tokenomics, policy enforcement, and security across models, agents, and tools F5 today introduced 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 optimizing 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. 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. "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 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."[1] Bringing AI costs under control 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. Governing agents and controlling tool access 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. 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. Protecting AI data flows and proving compliance 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. The enforcement points for the F5 AI Security Platform 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.

F5 enhances AI Gateway, integrates into security platform By Investing.com

SEATTLE - F5 Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) announced enhancements to its F5 AI Gateway and integrated the solution into the F5 AI Security Platform, according to a press release statement issued today. The enhanced gateway enforces policies on AI requests and provides a control plane for governing access to AI models, agents, and tools. The solution combines three functions: Model Gateway for model access and cost optimization, MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool governance, and AI Guardrails for prompt and response protection. F5's 2026 State of Application Strategy Report found that 77% of organizations identify inference as their dominant AI activity, with organizations managing an average of seven AI models. "Every AI request carries economic, security, and governance implications, yet most organizations are relying on fragmented tools that address only part of the problem," said Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5. The Model Gateway attributes tokens by provider, model, team, and user, while enforcing per-team budgets. The company states the solution is designed to reduce token spend by up to 60% without application changes through features including smart routing, model tiering, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing. The MCP Gateway provides access controls limiting agents to authorized resources, including APIs, data sources, and RAG systems. An audit trail captures access details and agent activities. F5 AI Guardrails inspect prompts and responses, redacting sensitive data before reaching models and blocking injection and jailbreak attempts. The system includes audit trails, SIEM export, and data residency controls aligned with SOC 2, ISO, and HIPAA frameworks. F5 introduced the F5 AI Security Platform earlier this year. The platform includes four pillars: AI governance, AI usage control, AI security testing, and AI runtime protection. The F5 AI Gateway is deployable across SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and hybrid multicloud environments, with air-gapped support planned for regulated use cases. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

F5 Introduces Enhancements to F5 AI Gateway and Integrates Solution into F5 AI Security Platform

F5 introduced 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 optimizing the economics of AI at scale. 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, 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 wherever the models, agents and AI apps run, providing a single operations pane for AI platform ops, AI Security ops and finance teams. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.