Loading…
AI Gateway
17 posts about AI Gateway. Every summary links to the original.
How Databricks manages its own coding agent spend with Unity AI Gateway Budgets
Databricks describes how it manages coding-agent costs as thousands of engineers use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other tools, creating exposure to runaway automation and growing R&D spend. The company routes all agent traffic through Unity AI Gateway Budgets and separates short-term runaway-spend protection from long-term monthly spend governance. A daily budget triggers self-service acknowledgement through Slack, an internal portal, or the CLI, while a high monthly limit uses manager-approved, project-scoped tiers that expire. Both budgets apply simultaneously, so effective usage is capped by the lower of the month-to-date total plus one runaway increment and the monthly maximum. Centralizing metering also gives managers and finance shared usage data, and the company reports that approval queues disappeared, monthly requests became rare, and engineers stopped rationing usage.
Rohit Agrawal, Shuyu Cao, Darming Zhao, Zack Siegel, Aaron DavidsonIntroducing AI spend controls with Unity AI Gateway
Unity AI Gateway now offers AI Spend Controls, extending existing cost visibility with proactive budget alerts across models and workloads. The feature supports budgets at user, use-case, workspace, and account levels, plus shared and per-user thresholds that can trigger email alerts or enforce hard caps by stopping requests after a limit is exceeded. Configuration starts in account settings under Usage and Budgets, where administrators select Unity AI Gateway, optionally scope workspaces and resource tags, and define monthly limits and recipients. Budget status and trends are available in the Cost section, while customizable Cost Analytics dashboards use Unity Catalog system tables to attribute DBU and model-provider costs by identity, workspace, endpoint, tags, model, provider, and request tags. The release positions Databricks budgets, Unity AI Gateway, and Unity Catalog as a combined governance layer for controlling AI access, usage, and spend.
Kevin StumpfMeta’s Spark Muse 1.1 is now available on Databricks, fully governed by Unity AI Gateway
Databricks announces support for Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 through Model Provider Services (MPS) in Unity AI Gateway, addressing fragmented API keys, access controls, and usage visibility when organizations adopt new models. An MPS is a Unity Catalog securable that stores provider configuration and an encrypted API key, while callers use their Databricks credentials and the gateway attaches the key at request time. The post demonstrates registering Muse Spark through the OpenAI provider type with Meta’s API base URL and Responses API, then governing use with Unity Catalog privileges, model allowlists, policies, rate limits, usage metering, and inference tables. Requests are routed through the gateway, where access and guardrails are applied before reaching Meta; usage, spend, tokens, latency, status codes, and optionally full payloads are recorded for attribution and audit.
Pavithra Rao, Shaotong Li, Martin Grund, Kelly AlbanoInkling model from Thinking Machines Lab now on Databricks
Databricks announces that Inkling, Thinking Machines Lab’s first open-weights model, is available to enterprise customers through the Unity AI Gateway. The model is positioned for coding and agentic reasoning workflows, supports multi-modal inputs, and can be applied to enterprise data, including proprietary codebases, internal documentation, and domain-specific data. Unity AI Gateway provides centralized security, permissions, audit logging, policy enforcement, cost controls, budgets, and observability, while data remains within the governed environment; Inkling is invoked through a REST API, with SQL query support planned. Teams can try it in AI Playground, deploy a governed endpoint, connect coding agents such as Cursor, OpenCode, or Pi, and build agents with Agent Bricks, with open weights enabling customization and inference-cost optimization without per-token API pricing.
Mike Eastham, Yuchen Jin, Preslav LeData-Native AI Agents: Why Agents Must Move to Your Data
Enterprise AI pilots often move data into separate vector databases, SaaS LLMs, or serving layers, creating governance gaps, compounded latency, fragmented costs and observability, and duplicated lifecycle work. The post advocates data-native agents: models, agents, tools, retrieval, and memory run inside the governed data platform, with policy enforced during query planning and computation rather than after responses are produced. It argues that post-hoc controls cannot undo sensitive information encoded in aggregations and can trigger token-burning retry loops. For state and memory, it presents Lakebase, managed PostgreSQL within Databricks, as transactional storage and a shared source of truth for multi-agent swarms. The described platform pattern combines Unity Catalog, Unity AI Gateway, Model Serving, MLflow 3, AI Search, Lakebase, and business-context services, and recommends inventorying workloads already outside the perimeter before closing seams incrementally.
Kaan Kuguoglu, John KarlssonOpenAI and Databricks at DAIS 2026: Making enterprise AI real
At Data + AI Summit 2026, Databricks and OpenAI presented a partnership centered on combining OpenAI’s frontier models and agents with Databricks’ enterprise context and control. The post describes GPT models and Codex running natively on Databricks, with Unity AI Gateway governing interactions, budgets, routing, auditing, and visibility, while Agent Tools provide governed enterprise data access through MCPs. Examples include OpenAI’s marketing data foundation on Databricks, which cut storage costs by $400,000 per month, and a Hertz application built in 11 business days with GPT-5.5 and Databricks that lifted lead conversion from 60–65% to 75–80%. The sessions argue that deployment, security, evaluation, monitoring, context, and sharing comprise most of the work around enterprise agents. A joint virtual event scheduled for August will address shipping agentic applications at scale, including a Stellantis case study.
Margaret AmoriBuilding an open ecosystem for AI governance with Unity AI Gateway
Databricks announced the Unity AI Gateway partner ecosystem, extending enterprise AI governance beyond models to runtime interactions among models, agents, MCP servers, skills, and AI tools. Built on Unity Catalog, the gateway lets organizations apply policies, monitor activity, manage spend, and govern AI across providers and frameworks, while integrating security, identity, and governance products they already use. The announcement groups the integrations into runtime AI security, observability and guardrails; agent identity and access governance; and AI observability and risk monitoring. Named integrations include Alice, CrowdStrike Falcon AI Detection and Response, Cyera, HiddenLayer, Netskope, Noma Security, Obsidian Security, Openlayer, Okta, Ping Identity, SailPoint, and Saviynt, with described capabilities including prompt-injection detection, data-loss prevention, agent discovery, authorization, and lifecycle governance.
David Nasi, Kelly Albano, Ashish KathapurkarWhat’s new with Unity Catalog at Data + AI Summit 2026
At Data + AI Summit 2026, Unity Catalog announcements position the catalog as a runtime governance layer for enterprise data and AI, organized around control, context, and choice. Control additions include Unity AI Gateway for governing models, agents, MCP services, skills, and tools; contextual service policies can allow, deny, or require approval for runtime actions, while budgets, hard caps, tracing, and guardrails address spend, investigation, and safety. Context additions include Glossary and Domains for business meaning and scoped asset organization, plus Metrics that standardize KPIs for SQL, BI tools, APIs, and agents; Genie Ontology is described as a continuously learned enterprise context layer. Choice additions span cross-cloud and cross-region addressability, managed disaster recovery, Delta and Iceberg interoperability, multimodal and geospatial types, and open sharing of data, AI assets, and applications across organizations.
The Unity Catalog Product and Engineering TeamAI governance at Data + AI Summit 2026: What’s new with Unity AI Gateway
Databricks announces new Unity AI Gateway capabilities for governing enterprise AI as organizations operate multi-model, multi-agent, and multi-vendor estates connected to models, MCP services, APIs, and tools. The update adds unified spend visibility, granular attribution, hard spend caps, and smart routing, alongside Unity Catalog support for registering and governing models, MCP services, agents, and skills. Contextual Service Policies, in Beta, can allow, deny, or require approval for actions based on users, agents, models, tools, services, or request and response contents, with guardrails for risks such as PII exposure and prompt injection. The announcement also covers end-to-end tracing, coding-agent analysis with Genie, incident investigation with Lakewatch, ecosystem integrations, and Managed Omnigent on Databricks in Beta.
David Nasi, Stefania Leone, Ahmed Bilal, Kevin Stumpf, Martin Grund, Vladimir Kolovski, Kelly AlbanoClaude Fable 5 is now available on Databricks, fully governed through Unity AI Gateway
Claude Fable 5 is now generally available on Databricks, with rollout across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud through Unity AI Gateway. The Mythos-class model targets long-running, complex, and ambiguous work, including autonomous enterprise workflows, document question answering, code investigation, and multimodal tasks. In Databricks' OfficeQA Pro benchmark, Fable 5 achieved 57.9% correctness, setting a state of the art; compared with Claude Opus 4.8, it was 20% more accurate and used 12% fewer tool calls, but ran approximately 30% slower and generated 2.5x more output tokens. Unity AI Gateway provides unified API access, fine-grained permissions, Unity Catalog logging, request and tool-call guardrails, and spend controls. Agent Bricks supports domain-specific agents, while Anthropic's policy includes 30-day retention for trust and safety purposes only.
Ahmed Bilal, Ivan Zhou, Yash Oza, Gautam Venkatesh, Alice Li, Harish GaurHow World Bank Group uses Databricks to eradicate poverty through shared knowledge
The World Bank Group is building a unified data and AI platform on Databricks to make tens of millions of repository documents and structured operational data findable for teams pursuing shared prosperity. Legacy databases and disconnected document repositories forced researchers to search manually, slowing decisions and limiting the ability to surface lessons learned across its global portfolio. The implementation migrates operational data, applies Unity Catalog governance, uses Databricks Volumes for unstructured content, Genie for natural-language structured queries, a metrics layer for deterministic reporting, and vector search for retrieval-augmented generation over project documents. Because each Genie serves a specific metrics domain, an agentic layer combines intent and domain classification with query decomposition, routing requests among domain agents, RAG, and visualization components before assembling one response; a multi-region feedback prototype was deployed in approximately two and a half days.
Kacey HertanWhat’s new in Unity AI Gateway: service policies, guardrails, observability, and cost controls for AI agents and MCPs
Unity AI Gateway is expanding runtime governance for production AI agents, model calls, and MCP tool interactions as teams face rising costs, unclear behavior, and limited control. The Beta adds LLM-based guardrails, token-level cost attribution with per-user alerts and hard budget limits, payload logging, and MCP service policies. Guardrails use a model and prompt to evaluate inputs, outputs, or both in real time, while inference tables and Unity Catalog system tables centralize governed records of usage and interactions. For MCPs, administrators can define SQL policies as Unity Catalog functions using agent identity, user context, and request parameters to constrain tool access and sensitive actions. The capabilities are available in Beta, with payload logging and service policies offered through gated enrollment, and are intended to improve observability, compliance, and cost control.
David Nasi, Kelly AlbanoThe next generation of Databricks Genie
The next generation of Databricks Genie expands the assistant beyond individual Genie Spaces, combining structured and unstructured enterprise data in a unified chat experience. It reuses logic from certified Genie Spaces, governed dashboards, and Databricks Apps, with metadata-based routing that prioritizes higher-trust sources, while new reasoning models and agent architecture handle questions spanning multiple domains. Built-in connectors for Google Drive and SharePoint, plus MCP support, let Genie access knowledge stores and take actions; Unity Catalog AI Gateway manages these connections. The experience replaces Databricks One as an account-level global home, adding domains, custom URLs, unified login, automated identity management, and governance through Unity Catalog. Native iOS and Android apps extend access to dashboards, apps, and chat beyond desktop environments.
Ken Wong, Dillon Morrison, Richard TomlinsonGoverning coding agent sprawl with Unity AI Gateway
Databricks introduces coding agent support in Unity AI Gateway to address security, cost, and visibility challenges created by organizations using multiple coding tools. The gateway provides a unified governance hub for Codex, Cursor, and Gemini CLI, combining access controls, usage statistics, operational observability, cost management, guardrails, and inference capacity. Agent access can be governed centrally, with audit logs in Unity Catalog, MCP servers managed in Databricks, MLflow tracing, shared cost limits, and coding metrics and traces ingested into Unity Catalog-managed Delta tables through OpenTelemetry. The announcement says developers can authenticate with Databricks credentials across connected services, use centralized budgets and model capacity, and let organizations analyze adoption, developer velocity, and rate-limit pressure in the lakehouse; support for Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI is available to all Databricks customers.
Aarushi Shah, Ankit Mathur, Bilal, Kevin Stumpf, Rohit Agrawal, Harish Gaur, Ana NietoExpanding agent governance with Unity AI Gateway
Unity AI Gateway extends Unity Catalog’s permissions, auditing, and policy controls to agentic workflows involving LLMs, MCP servers, and APIs. The release addresses limited visibility across multi-step actions with on-behalf-of user execution for MCP calls, configurable guardrails, and consistent governance across model providers without separate configurations for each provider and model choice can vary by task. Guardrails can detect PII, prompt injection, unsafe content, and data exfiltration, while logs capture identities, timestamps, MCP details, dollar costs, payloads, latency, status codes, and errors. OpenAI-compatible APIs, fallback models, and endpoint-, user-, or group-level rate limits support production operation, although some capabilities are in Beta or rolling out and availability is limited to supported Databricks regions.
David NasiAgent Bricks: The governed enterprise agent platform
Agent Bricks is presented as Databricks’ enterprise platform for building, deploying, and governing agents that operate on business data under real identities, permissions, and operational constraints. The platform combines multi-model and framework support, execution, routing, fallback, cost optimization, and unified governance through Unity Catalog and AI Gateway, including on-behalf-of token passing and observability across data, models, MCPs, and APIs. Its context layer uses metadata such as schemas, business definitions, lineage, permissions, and data-quality signals, while Genie Spaces, Document Intelligence, Knowledge Assistant, and Agent Mode address structured and unstructured business information. The announcement includes general availability for Document Intelligence, Custom Agents on Apps, and Supervisor Agent, plus AI Gateway guardrails, managed OAuth MCP Connectors, web search, and MLflow’s CLEARS evaluation framework; the post reports 70% higher accuracy than standard RAG and a 30% improvement in multi-step workflows.
Kasey UhlenhuthGrab ·
Grab AI Gateway: Connecting Grabbers to multiple GenAI providers
Grab AI Gateway is a central access layer connecting Grabbers’ applications to multiple GenAI providers, including OpenAI, Azure, AWS Bedrock, and Google VertexAI. Built as a set of reverse proxies, it centralizes provider authentication, authorization, rate limiting, auditing, and capacity management while presenting a unified OpenAI-style API; users can switch models by changing the model parameter. Exploration keys support short-lived staging experiments, while reviewed use cases can use longer-term service keys, and the gateway exposes embedding, image, audio, fine-tuning, search, and in-house open source models. Shared capacity, dynamic routing, monitoring, cost attribution, and usage records support governance and efficiency, although batch traffic can interfere with latency-sensitive services and provider-specific SDK edge cases require integration testing. More than 3,000 Grabbers have requested exploration keys, and the gateway powers applications including ride-safety audio analysis, content moderation, SQL generation, incident automation, and Slack support.
Bjorn Jee
