Kong AI Gateway

Kong AI Gateway is an extension of Kong's battle-tested API gateway platform, adding LLM-specific plugins (prompt guards, semantic caching, PII sanitization, token rate limiting, multi-provider routing) on top of an Nginx/OpenResty core that was originally built for REST and microservice traffic. The "AI-native" framing is partially marketing: critics consistently note that AI capabilities sit as a plugin layer on a general-purpose proxy, which introduces operational overhead and latency that purpose-built LLM gateways avoid. The product is most defensible for organizations already standardized on Kong, where adding AI governance to an existing footprint is low friction; for greenfield AI teams, the platform weight is hard to justify purely for LLM routing. Pricing complexity, with per-service fees compounding across every model endpoint, is a structural concern for high-volume AI workloads. Kong is well-capitalized and moving fast (Agent Gateway, MCP support, OpenMeter acquisition), but the competitive field of lighter, AI-native alternatives is also growing quickly.