Agent Router (United States, an Agentic AI Foundation project) is an open-source AI gateway built on Envoy. It provides an OpenAI-compatible API across several model providers and a single router for MCP tools. The project was called Envoy AI Gateway and became a standalone AAIF project, keeping the same code, the same maintainers and the Apache-2.0 license.
What it’s for
- Connecting agents to 16 providers through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint
- Routing, model-name virtualization and failover across providers
- Enforcing token limits per team, application or model
- Keeping provider credentials out of application code
- Exposing a single MCP tool catalog, filtered per agent
- Observability with OpenTelemetry GenAI conventions
How it works
- The project configures Envoy, which handles the AI traffic
- One command starts the gateway locally; the same configuration moves to Kubernetes
- Providers, credentials, quotas and tools are described once and applied to every request
- Routing takes inference capacity and self-hosted endpoints into account
- The API, CRDs and API group remain the same as in the previous phase
How it differs
- It is the control plane the user runs, with no SaaS offering from the project
- It uses Envoy’s data plane, already proven in production
- Governance is neutral, under the Agentic AI Foundation
- It must not be confused with agentgateway, another AAIF project
Availability and license
- Open source under Apache-2.0, with stable 1.x releases
- Distributed as a standalone binary and on Kubernetes
- No license cost; the cost is the infrastructure it runs on
Things to note
- Configuring and operating the gateway requires familiarity with Envoy and Kubernetes
- The 1.x series keeps a compatibility commitment, but the project keeps evolving
- Some features depend on the chosen provider and environment