Harness and Kong Expand Partnership for API and AI Security
Joint solution extends proven API gateway security to the AI era — with automated AI discovery and runtime AI protection
Harness, the AI Software Delivery Platform™ company, and Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to address the growing security challenges posed by AI-driven architectures, autonomous agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) deployments.
According to The State of AI-Native Application Security 2025 report, as enterprises race to deploy AI at scale, 62% have no visibility into where LLMs are in use across their environment, and 74% say AI sprawl will outpace API sprawl when it comes to risk — making embedded, infrastructure-level security more critical than ever. And companies are now deploying agents into their operations at an exponentially increasing rate, making it a necessity to protect the agents themselves and the systems interacting with those agents.
Also Read: Infrastructure as Code Governance: Managing Risk in Enterprise Cloud Environments
The two companies are extending their joint solution from Kong API Gateway to also include Kong AI Gateway, bringing Harness’s AI security intelligence directly into the AI infrastructure layer and enabling enterprises to discover, monitor, and protect every agent, AI asset, LLM-powered service, and MCP-connected workflow that traverses it.
A Proven Foundation: Harness and Kong API Gateway
Harness and Kong have been jointly trusted by enterprises to deliver best-in-class API security for years. The existing Harness and Kong API Gateway integration provides:
- Comprehensive API traffic visibility and behavioral analysis across all Kong-managed services
- Real-time detection and blocking of API threats, including OWASP API Security Top 10 risks, credential stuffing attacks, and business logic abuse
- Continuous sensitive data tracking to identify PII exposure and regulatory risk
- Zero-friction deployment alongside existing Kong configurations
This new offering of the AI Gateway solution applies the same level of security depth to AI infrastructure, ensuring that security teams are not left behind as their organizations adopt AI and agentic operations.
“Our partnership with Harness has given joint customers production-grade API security that works with the way they build, not against it,” said Ken Kim, Senior Vice President, Business Development at Kong Inc. “Extending to include Kong AI Gateway is a natural next step. The same enterprises are now moving AI into production through our gateway and need the same depth of visibility and control they’ve come to rely on for their APIs for all AI traffic types including LLM, MCP, and A2A. That’s exactly what this delivers and is crucial for organizations scaling in the agentic era.”
Also Read: Infrastructure as Code vs Configuration Management: What’s the Difference?
The New Frontier: Kong AI Gateway and Harness AI Security
As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, the attack surface has fundamentally shifted. AI agents, LLM-powered microservices, and MCP-enabled integrations introduce new vectors that traditional security tools were not designed to address. Unlike traditional software, AI agents are non-deterministic — the same agent can behave differently on consecutive runs, making it impossible to secure them the way you’d secure a static API. The new Harness and Kong AI Gateway integration directly tackles these challenges across two critical domains: AI discovery and AI protection.
AI Discovery
Harness automatically inventories every AI asset, API, MCP server, tool, prompt, and resource routed through Kong AI Gateway — providing security teams with a continuously updated catalog of their AI attack surface. No manual documentation. No blind spots.
AI Protection
Harness applies behavioral analysis and anomaly detection to AI traffic in real time, identifying prompt injection attacks, data exfiltration through AI responses, jailbreaking, malicious code in prompts, and other AI-specific threats. Enterprises gain the same depth of observability and protection for their agents and AI workloads that they already rely on for traditional APIs, with full prompt and response details available for incident investigation and inline policy enforcement through Kong AI Gateway.
“Shadow AI has become the defining security blind spot for enterprises today. Traditional tools were built for static code and predictable systems, not for adaptive AI models, agent-to-agent communication, and MCP-connected workflows that evolve continuously,” said Rahul Sood, GM of Application Security at Harness. “This integration of Harness AI Security with Kong puts security intelligence directly into the connectivity layer where AI traffic flows. Joint customers now have the visibility and control they need to move fast without losing sight of what’s happening across their AI infrastructure.”
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