The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), under the Linux Foundation, has announced that the "Envoy AI Gateway" project, which has been developed as open source, has joined the foundation and changed its name to "Agent Router." This announcement was made during a keynote speech at the Tokyo event "AGNTCon + MCPCon Japan 2026" on September 10.

Agent Router is software that absorbs differences in API specifications among multiple AI services, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Amazon Bedrock, providing a single common API endpoint. It features the ability to switch the AI models being used without rewriting the application-side code.

Additionally, it includes functions such as bundling multiple MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to make them accessible via a single endpoint, authentication via OAuth, fallback from one specific service to another, and token usage limits. It is also capable of optimal routing based on request metrics and load balancing through dynamic load balancing.

The project has already reached version 1.1 and is in a state ready for use in production environments. AAIF intends to promote Agent Router toward becoming an industry standard.

In connection with this, the keynote speech also touched upon the progress of MCP. David Soria Parra from Anthropic revealed that tool calls via MCP have exceeded a cumulative total of approximately 1 billion on Claude, and MCP SDK downloads have surpassed 500 million per month, indicating a rapid surge in usage across the entire industry. As a future outlook, he stated that they aim to make MCP the standard protocol for agent messaging and orchestration, and are moving forward with the introduction of new concepts such as "MCP Tasks."

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