As companies pile more AI agents and language models into their daily operations, keeping track of what’s actually being used and how much it’s all costing has become a real headache. But A10 Networks is stepping in with the A10 AI Gateway, a new control plane designed to centralize AI management across an entire organization.
Instead of AI usage sprawling across different teams, tools, and models with no real oversight, the Gateway acts as a single management layer handling routing, cost tracking, and governance all in one place. It automatically picks the right AI model for each request based on content and usage policy, giving IT teams centralized visibility into what’s actually happening across the organization’s AI stack.
Speaking of the newly added features, Identity-based AI Access syncs with a company’s existing directory systems, so different teams can get different model access and routing policies; engineering might get access to more powerful reasoning models while finance sticks to something more cost-efficient, for example. Meanwhile, Smart Routing takes that further by actually evaluating the complexity of each request, sending simple tasks to cheaper models and reserving the heavier, more capable models for requests that genuinely need advanced reasoning.
On the cost and governance side, the Gateway offers real-time, per-request cost tracking in actual dollar amounts, along with token budget management by model or team, complete with hard limits and soft-limit alerts. It also ties into A10’s existing AI security tools, including TrojAI, A10 AI Firewall, and ThreatX, covering security across the entire AI lifecycle from pre-deployment testing through runtime protection.
A10 Networks is also gunning for deployment flexibility, as AI Gateway can run as standalone software or with integrated hardware, and it’s built to operate entirely within a customer’s own environment, whether that’s on-premises, private cloud, or even air-gapped setups. That gives organizations real control over their data and models, something A10 is positioning as a genuine advantage over cloud-hosted alternatives when data sovereignty matters.
The A10 AI Gateway is scheduled to become available in Q4 of 2026.
