Why Tech Giants Are Backing the New Agentgateway Project
A new open source project aims to accelerate the emergence of AI agents using multiple large language models (LLMs).
At the Open Source Summit Europe in Amsterdam, the Linux Foundation officially welcomed the agentgateway project into its portfolio. The name of the game is to accelerate the adoption of AI agents in enterprise and multiagent systems.
The agentgateway project, which began at the cloud native application networking company Solo.io, is an open source, AI-native proxy, created to optimize connectivity, security and observability for AI agentic software.
Unlike traditional gateways, which were designed before the surge of AI agents and often cannot adapt to new protocols, agentgateway is purpose-built for the unique demands of agentic AI infrastructure. Its core mission is to connect, govern and secure communication between AI agents, tools and LLMs at enterprise scale.
“The future of software is agentic, and that changes everything about how systems connect and communicate,” said Idit Levine, Solo.io’s CEO, in the Aug. 25 announcement.
“Existing API gateways weren’t designed for the rapidly evolving networking demands of AI and agentic architectures, and they can’t adapt fast enough. We built agentgateway from the ground up to handle the protocols, patterns, and scale required for agentic infrastructure.”
She concluded, “Agentgateway is the connective tissue for the next generation of intelligent systems.” We’ll see if this prediction comes true.
What Agentgateway Provides
Agentgateway supports emerging agentic protocols such as Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). If those sound familiar, it’s because A2A was recently donated to the Linux Foundation by Google, while the Linux Foundation enabled MCP to be used with A2A via Cisco’s AGNTCY.
The Linux Foundation, best known for its support of Linux and open source initiatives, is quickly becoming a major player in the burgeoning field of AI agents.
In his keynote, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, explained why the organization is going all in on AI agents.
“The rise of AI agents depends on a strong foundation of open source infrastructure that is built to last,” he said. “The agentgateway project provides a centralized and secure management layer for AI agent interactions.
The project has quickly attracted broad industry backing, with contributors and supporters from tech leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Shell and Zayo.
Under the Linux Foundation’s neutral, vendor-agnostic governance model, agentgateway is poised to grow as a collaborative, community-driven platform.
‘A Solid Step Toward the Future’
In the announcement of agentgateway’s entry into the Linux Foundation, Jon Alexander, Akamai’s senior vice president for cloud technology, expressed optimism about the project.
“Agentic AI demands purpose-built infrastructure, not just another software layer,” Alexander stated. “This requires rethinking compute, storage, and data movement from the ground up, so retrofitting legacy systems doesn’t work.
“The agentgateway project is a solid step toward that future. We’re happy to see it hosted by the Linux Foundation, where open source and community can drive the adoption and longevity that AI infrastructure requires.”
The agentgateway project is now available on GitHub under the Linux Foundation umbrella, open for collaboration and contributions from the global community. Its development underscores the ever-increasing importance of AI agent interoperability, security and transparency for enterprises moving toward an agentic future.
Will it live up to the hopes its backers have for it? AI agents are still a new technology and, for all the hype they’ve garnered, it remains to be seen if they’ll be as big a deal as their supporters would have us believe.
To learn more about agentgateway, check out this episode of The New Stack Agents livestream, with guest Lin Sun of Solo.io and Frederic Lardinois, TNS senior editor for AI.
