13 Best AI Gateways in 2026: Model Routing, MCP Access, and Agent Actions

AI gateway infrastructure spans distinct runtime paths: model gateways manage inference routing, costs, caching, rate limits, and failover, while MCP and tool gateways connect agents to external tools, and actions runtimes add delegated user authentication, agent-scoped permissions, per-action policies, reliable execution, and audit records for business-system operations. The comparison assesses 13 platforms, including model-focused products such as OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Bifrost, Vercel AI Gateway, Cloudflare AI Gateway, and Portkey, alongside agent and MCP platforms including Arcade.dev, Kong, TrueFoundry, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Composio, Obot, and Stacklok ToolHive. It argues that product categories alone are insufficient: organizations should verify where authorization is enforced, how user and agent permissions intersect, how credentials and failures are handled, and whether execution records capture identities, policy decisions, outcomes, and errors. The source presents Arcade.dev as an actions runtime for governed agent activity and notes that it can be combined with a separate model gateway when multi-provider inference routing is also required. It recommends testing realistic workflows involving users with different permissions, permitted and denied actions, provider or tool failures, and audit evidence, while considering deployment requirements such as hosted, private-cloud, on-premises, or air-gapped environments.

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