AI Gateway is the control point for agentic AI
Brokering every agent interaction across MCP and A2A with least-privileged access enforcement
Every agent action authorized inline, in real time, not just authenticated once
A registry of every agent operating in your environment, with owners and permissions
The agentic future adopted on your terms, at your pace, based on your risk appetite
No Agent Acts Without Authorization
AI Gateway sits in the path of agent communications across MCP and A2A, the protocols agents use to reach tools, data, and each other. Agent traffic stops being invisible and becomes governed activity.
The integrated Agent Registry gives every agent an identity, an owner, and a defined set of permissions. Homegrown or third-party, long-running or momentary, every agent in your environment is fully on record.
Least-privileged access enforced per action, not per session. Each request is evaluated in real time against who the agent is, what it is trying to do, and what your policy allows. Autonomy proceeds at machine speed, inside the lines you set.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 25% of enterprise breaches will be traced back to AI agent abuse
Your identity stack answers one question well: is this who it claims to be? That works for people, who log in, do their work, and log out. Agents break the model. One authenticated agent can take ten thousand actions before lunch, delegate work to other agents you never approved, and disappear before your next access review. Knowing who an agent is tells you almost nothing about what it should be allowed to do and just watching things unfold is not control. Agent security must put the decision point ahead of the action, so that every request an agent makes is evaluated inline against policy the moment it is made.
How it works
The Decision Point for Agentic Traffic
Applies intent-based
and context-aware policies to every agent request
Mediates agent communications across MCP and A2A
applying policy to each request an agent makes
Maintains the Agent Registry
agent identity, ownership, and permission scope, managed in one place
Enforces least privilege per action
with agent identity, requested operation, and access context as inputs to each decision
Uses access context from AI Access Graph
so authorization decisions reflect what an agent should reach, not just what it asks for
Designed for ephemeral agents
whose identities may exist for seconds, where manual onboarding and offboarding cannot keep up
Policy is defined once in Zscaler and applies to agents
alongside users and workloads, in the same framework
Use cases
Every Agent Registered, Every Action Authorized
Agents act on your data and systems at machine speed, chain to other agents, and sometimes exist for only seconds. AI Gateway stands between every agent and everything it touches, so every action is authorized before it happens, not investigated after.
An agent inherits broad access from the identity that deployed it and quietly keeps it. The graph shows the gap between what it can reach and what its job requires, and the fix takes minutes instead of a quarter.
An agent tasked with summarizing a report starts reaching into systems the task never required. Per-action authorization stops the reach at the moment of the request, and the registry shows exactly which permissions to trim.
Teams are deploying agents faster than any review board can meet. The registry becomes the front door: an agent gets an identity, an owner, and scoped permissions as a matter of process, and security stops being the bottleneck.
Short-lived agents spin up, act, and vanish faster than any manual process can track. Registration and per-action authorization work at the same speed the agents do, so a nine-second lifespan gets the same governance as a nine-month one.
Better together
Part of Zscaler AI Security
The gateway decides in the moment. The platform supplies everything the decision needs.
AI Access Graph
every agent discovered and mapped to what it can reach, feeding authorization decisions with access context; unregistered agents surface instead of operating unseen.
AI Red Teaming
MCP servers and agentic workflows tested continuously, so the gateway defends systems that have already been hardened.
AI Guard for Users
the content of prompts and responses inspected in real time, alongside the gateway's action-level decisions.
AI Endpoint Security
agents and AI tools on devices governed by the same policy before their traffic ever leaves the machine.
Dhawal Sharma zero trust AI
Q&A
No. API gateways manage service traffic for developers. AI Gateway is a security control that governs what agents are allowed to do, action by action, under zero trust policy.
MCP and A2A, the protocols agents use to reach tools, data, and each other.
Yes. Third-party and homegrown agents alike get registry identities and per-action authorization; discovery surfaces the ones nobody registered.
Authentication establishes who an agent is, once. AI Gateway authorizes what it does, every time. For systems that act autonomously at machine speed, the second question is the one that protects you.