Agents & MCP
AI gateway
A single point that all AI traffic passes through on its way to the providers — the place where keys are resolved, budgets are checked, calls are logged, and policies are enforced. It's the choke point that makes control possible, because everything flows through it.
Example
Every model call in the company routes through one gateway. Because it sees every request before it leaves, it can enforce a hard cap, redact PII, serve a cache hit, or refuse an over-budget call — none of which is possible if traffic scatters directly to providers.
Related terms
Spend control plane
The layer that governs AI spend across an organization: it issues virtual keys, enforces budgets before calls, attributes every dollar, and produces the audit record. "Observability" tells you what you spent; a control plane decides whether you spend it — the enforcement happens before the call, not after. (This is Tokenality's category.)
Budget cap (hard cap)
A spending limit enforced before a call is sent, not an alert fired after. When the cap is reached, the next call is refused — no spend occurs. A hard cap is a circuit breaker; an alert is a smoke detector that may or may not wake anyone.
PII pre-flight
A check that scans a prompt for personal or sensitive data before it reaches the model provider, and blocks or redacts it if found. "Fail-closed" means a fault stops the call rather than letting it through — the safe default when a check can't complete.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open standard for how AI agents connect to external tools and data sources in a consistent way — a common "plug" so any compatible agent can use any compatible tool. It's how modern agents reach beyond the model to your systems.