Weekly Update — April 20–27, 2026

[missBerg]

Lots shipped this week across MCP, multi-provider translation, and observability — plus the first public discussions kicking off the road to v1.0 GA in June. Thanks to everyone who contributed code, reviews, and issues. 🎉

🛣️ Road to v1.0 GA — your input wanted

We've opened the first tracking and discussion issues for the v1.0 release. These are the best place to weigh in if you have opinions on scope, cadence, or how we'll support the project post-GA:

• #2083 — Road to v1.0 GA tracking
• #2085 — Release manager for v1.0
• #2084 — Support window for v1.x minor releases

If you're running AI Gateway in production or planning to, please drop a comment on the support-window thread — that's where downstream consumer feedback matters most.

✨ What's new

Provider & translation coverage

• GCP Workload Identity on GKE — #1979 by @rajatvig. Authenticate to GCP backends via Application Default Credentials, no static keys required. Big win for GKE deployments.
• OpenAI → Bedrock embeddings translation — #1969 by @Flgado, with a follow-up dataplane fix in #2081. Route OpenAI-format embedding requests to AWS Bedrock Titan.
• Gemini reasoning / thinking blocks — #1995 by @Flgado. Fixes translation parity for Gemini non-streaming reasoning. Closes #1974.
• Claude thinking block fixes — #1988 by @hustxiayang.

MCP

MCP saw a strong week:

• Per-backend ForwardHeaders with rename support — #2047 by @mohitgurnani. Configure header forwarding (and renaming) per backend on MCPRouteBackendRef. Resolves the long-running discussion in #1966.
• Tool name in access logs — #2067 by @nacx. MCP tool name now appears in access log entries. Closes #2059.
• Orphan resource cleanup for MCPRoute backendRefs — #2075 by @kkk777-7. Orphaned HTTPRoutes are cleaned up when backendRefs change. Closes #1814.

Observability & rate limiting

• OTEL: removed span attribute count limit — #2064 by @edan-binshtok. Traces no longer silently drop attributes for large context windows. Closes #2051.
• Route-scoped LLM request costs + global defaults — #2029 by @sukumargaonkar. Cost-based rate limiting is now route-scoped. Relates to #1688 and #2012.

💡 New design proposals & feature requests

A few new threads worth a read if any of these are in your wheelhouse:

• Human-in-the-loop for MCP tool calls — #2073 by @denniskniep. Mechanism for human approval before MCP tool execution.
• MCP content filter proposal — #2077 by @advaith-shesh73. Design doc for content filtering on MCP routes.
• OAuth 2.0 token exchange for MCP backends — #2052 by @nacx. Upstream auth design for MCP. Active discussion.
• Per-request AWS credentials for cost attribution — #2076 by @sc7565, with a draft implementation in #2082.
• Okta DCR blocked behind admin auth — #2074 by @tabletenniser. Affects Dynamic Client Registration flow.

👀 PRs looking for review

If you have time to help review, these are open and waiting:

• #2086 — PII redaction & rehydration processor by @tim-peyeeye
• #2071 — InferencePool metadata nil check by @ashnaaseth2325-oss
• #2061 & #2062 — OpenInference tracing for Responses API by @nuthalapativarun
• #2023 — Audio transcriptions/translations endpoints by @PatilHrushikesh

🙏 Thanks to this week's contributors

@rajatvig, @mohitgurnani, @Flgado, @nacx, @edan-binshtok, @kkk777-7, @sukumargaonkar, @hustxiayang, @missBerg, @sc7565, @denniskniep, @tabletenniser, @tim-peyeeye, @siddharth1036, @advaith-shesh73, @nuthalapativarun, @ashnaaseth2325-oss, @Koushik-Salammagari, @PatilHrushikesh, @adirags, @gavrissh, @nejch — and everyone who showed up to triage, review, and discuss.

See you next week!