Why Tetrate Joined AAIF: Making MCP the Backbone of the Agentic AI Era

Why AAIF, and Why Now

From Istio and Envoy to gRPC, Tetrate has spent years helping organizations secure and govern dynamic, distributed systems. The agentic era mirrors the early container wave: explosive experimentation but uneven definitions of production readiness and safety.

AAIF provides the industry’s shared foundation for standardization, particularly around Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the developer experience for building agents. With Anthropic’s MCP and Block’s Goose project now part of AAIF, alongside our work in Envoy AI Gateway (EAIG) and Tetrate Agent Router Service (TARS), the alignment is natural.

Working Across the AAIF Ecosystem

We’re joining an ecosystem where we already collaborate. Together with Bloomberg, we created Envoy AI gateway to unify and govern AI interactions across multiple systems. Bloomberg’s AAIF involvement demonstrates that Envoy AI Gateway is a critical component for powering real production AI workloads.

Block uses Tetrate Agent Router Service inside Goose, the open-source AI agent they contributed to AAIF.

Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block: “We’re excited to welcome Tetrate to the AAIF as a gold member. They have been leading the innovation in cloud native space with Envoy and Istio and Block worked closely with them on developing gRPC. Now, we’re seeing them innovate in agentic AI with their agent router service that we use in goose, the open source AI agent that we contributed to the AAIF. I look forward to their contributions and our collaboration in the foundation.”

David, co-author of MCP spec from Anthropic: “I am excited to see Tetrate join as gold members in AAIF. They have been driving the gateway layer in MCP space with Envoy AI Gateway and I look forward to their contributions to the foundation.”

The capabilities of EAIG, TARS, Goose, and MCP illustrate why AAIF is launching at the right time. The pieces exist. The industry needs a common home to evolve, harden, and operationalize them.

MCP at the Core of Tetrate’s AI Strategy

MCP sits at the center of our AI connectivity strategy. In Envoy AI Gateway, MCP support enables enterprises to consolidate and secure agent interactions through a single entrypoint, aggregating multiple MCP servers with consistent security policies (OAuth, API keys, identity translation), tool filtering, and Envoy’s proven networking for traffic shaping and observability.

Tetrate Agent Router Service takes MCP further: organizations can register, govern, and publish MCP servers with curated catalogs and strict access controls. TARS becomes the backbone for discovering and safely consuming MCP capabilities at scale. As agent deployments expand, MCP evolves from an optional integration layer to strategic infrastructure.

Why MCP Is Critical to the Agentic AI Stack

MCP brings order to integration chaos:

Eliminates fragmentation. Before MCP, every AI application built bespoke connections to every data source. Ten apps and twenty systems meant two hundred integrations. MCP collapses this to a single, reusable protocol maintained by proven open source standards.

Enables contextual intelligence. MCP standardizes discovery and structured access to databases, APIs, files, and tools across organizations, giving agents real-time, domain-specific context.

Makes architectures composable. Specialized servers expose capabilities without hardcoded dependencies. Agents orchestrate them dynamically, creating modular, maintainable AI systems.

Embeds governance and security. MCP servers act as controlled interfaces rather than direct system access, enabling consistent authentication, authorization, rate limits, and audit logs.

Bridges AI and enterprise systems. MCP becomes the universal adapter to existing infrastructure where most enterprise value resides.

MCP is to agentic AI what HTTP was to the web—a unifying protocol that enables interoperability and unlocks network effects.

What’s Next: 2026 Community Priorities

Several areas need focused community engagement:

• End-to-end traceability of MCP requests for debugging, governance, and safety
• Fine-grained security for MCP server tools and resources
• Improved developer ergonomics for building and operating MCP servers
• Enterprise-ready MCP security: identity, boundary controls, and auditability
• Expanded ecosystem of MCP servers, client tooling, and agent frameworks

Tetrate will invest in these areas, leveraging our experience from service meshes and cloud-native networking. Agentic AI is replaying the same evolution curve, just faster.

The Strategic Value: Tetrate as the Agentic Stack Backbone

Our mission remains consistent: provide the secure, governed connectivity layer for dynamic, distributed systems. In the agentic era, that layer is more critical than ever.

TARS, Goose, and MCP form a reference architecture across multiple industry segments and use cases. Agents need routing, policy enforcement, rate limiting, identity mediation, safety controls, and observability—exactly the domains where Envoy and Istio matured. We’re bringing that experience to AAIF so the ecosystem can accelerate.

Join Us

Get started today:

• Download Goose and experiment with Tetrate Agent Router Service: Goose Quickstart
• Join Goose Discord: Discord Invite
• Join MCP Contributor Discord: Discord Invite
• Learn About TARS: MCP Catalog Blog Post

AAIF is becoming the center of gravity for agentic infrastructure. We’re excited to help build it and work with the community on the challenges ahead.