Envoy AI Gateway becomes Agent Router and joins AAIF

When Bloomberg's engineers began connecting to external and self-managed models, they encountered a problem that had little to do with the models themselves. They recognized it as a traffic problem, one the industry had already spent a decade solving. In the summer of 2024, they brought it to the Envoy community, where they found they weren't alone and joined forces with Tetrate to solve the challenge.

Every provider exposed a different API. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and others each had their own request formats, authentication methods, and operational behavior. Every team building with models, and increasingly building agents, would need to understand those differences, manage provider credentials, and rebuild parts of its integration with every new provider.

What developers wanted was simple integration: one endpoint, one familiar API, and the freedom to switch models without rewriting anything. The platform needed to offer that simplicity while handling provider translation, credentials, routing, usage accounting, and failover behind the scenes.

Agent Router is the open source project that meets both needs.

Formerly Envoy AI Gateway, Agent Router gives developers a stable, OpenAI-compatible interface to models and one router for every MCP tool. Platform teams describe providers, credentials, quotas, and tools once; Agent Router turns that intent into configuration that Envoy applies to every request.

Today, Agent Router joins the Agentic AI Foundation. Version 1.1 shipped in August, building on the stable API and 1.x compatibility commitment established with version 1.0.

Built, adopted, matured — and now ready to move

Agent Router arrives at AAIF as mature software.

Development began in public in October 2024 and today the project has eleven publicly listed adopters, including Bloomberg, Tetrate, Tencent Cloud, Nutanix, LY Corporation, and the National Research Platform. Nine maintainer seats are shared across Bloomberg, Nutanix, AMD, Tetrate, and Netflix, with no company holding majority, alongside 132 contributors from 21 organizations and fifteen stable releases.

Version 1.0 shipped in June 2026 with a compatibility commitment for the 1.x series; version 1.1 followed in August. With those releases, moving from an Envoy sub-project to a standalone AAIF project made sense because the move brings the project closer to the agentic ecosystem and creates opportunities for cross-project collaboration.

What Agent Router brings to the AAIF ecosystem

AAIF hosts protocols, developer projects, and infrastructure for the agentic ecosystem. Agent Router helps developers understand and optimize the traffic layer, where teams choose which models and tools their agents call, see usage, cost, and latency for every request, and set quotas that keep spend where they expect it.

Agent Router combines the usability developers expect from a modern AI gateway with the stability and scale of Envoy, the proxy that already carries much of the world's production traffic. Developers get one API, one command to start, and model changes without code changes. The relationship with Envoy stays close because the community solves data-plane challenges in Envoy itself, while Agent Router provides the control plane that manages Envoy for AI traffic. This approach adds the traffic management that agentic systems need while preserving the reliable infrastructure the industry has already built.

The roadmap is steered in the open, and the project welcomes contributors who want to improve the developer experience through quickstarts, error messages, the standalone binary, and docs, as well as those who work on proxy internals. Usability is treated as a core project goal alongside ecosystem integrations.

"Building an open agentic ecosystem requires shared infrastructure that gives developers choice and organizations confidence in what they deploy. Agent Router contributes to that foundation, with an established community and a commitment to production use. AAIF provides a neutral home where that community can work across projects and companies to ensure the infrastructure evolves with the needs of the broader ecosystem." - Manik Surtani, co-founder and CTO, Agentic AI Foundation

“I am excited to bring Agent Router, powered by Envoy, to AAIF to enable agent builders to work with a proven traffic layer for AI. I look forward to working with the rest of the AI ecosystem—agent SDKs, coding agents, model providers, MCP and Tools providers, guardrail engines, and observability platforms—so that agent builders and operators can build, operate and scale agents in production without worrying about how to glue them all together and govern their use, with a reliable and secure traffic layer underneath." - Varun Talwar, co-founder and CTO, Tetrate

Integrate once. Switch models without rewriting.

For developers building agents, Agent Router removes the least interesting part of the job.

You call one familiar API. You do not learn each provider's request format, hold its credentials, or handle its failure modes. Once an Agent Router is set up and the models and tools are available behind it, moving your agent to another model can be as simple as changing the model name in the request.

Getting started requires only a single command, which starts Agent Router with its Envoy-powered data plane on a laptop; the same configuration model scales to a dedicated gateway or a Kubernetes platform as traffic does. New AI traffic lands on familiar operational ground: Envoy's established patterns for reliability, tail latency, observability, and troubleshooting, with the added context of models, tokens, inference capacity, and MCP authorization.

For existing Envoy AI Gateway users

The project name and governance are changing; existing deployments do not need to migrate for the rename. The 1.0 compatibility commitment remains in place throughout the 1.x series. The same community continues the work, Envoy remains the data plane, and the license remains Apache 2.0.

The repository will move to a new GitHub organization following this announcement. Existing links will redirect, and any required operational details will be published before the move.

Get involved

We are delighted to welcome Agent Router and its community to AAIF. The most valuable contribution is a production problem the community has not encountered yet.

• Trying Agent Router? Start with the standalone quickstart — one command, no cluster required.
• Evaluating it for a platform? Explore the reference architecture and provider examples.
• Already operating it? Bring your use case and requirements to the Monday community meeting — it's open to everyone, and the easiest way to get involved.
• Care about developer experience? The project is always welcoming contributors to shape usability — join Discord, review the roadmap, or open a design proposal.

For the architecture and implementation decisions behind Agent Router, read the accompanying technical blog post.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/theagentrouter/agent-router
• Website: https://theagentrouter.ai
• Discord: https://discord.gg/XvSqZZty7k