Build Secure, Production-Ready AI Agents with Bifrost’s MCP Gateway

Enterprise-grade tool orchestration for modern AI applications

As AI systems move beyond chatbots into autonomous agents and complex workflows, a new challenge emerges: enabling models to safely interact with external tools, APIs, and data sources. Uncontrolled tool execution introduces serious security, cost, and reliability risks.

Bifrost’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) Gateway solves this by providing a secure, scalable, and production-ready layer for AI tool orchestration.

What is the Model Context Protocol?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows AI models to discover and invoke external tools at runtime. Instead of being limited to text generation, models can search the web, query databases, access files, or run business logic via MCP servers.

Bifrost extends MCP by acting as both an MCP client that connects to multiple tool servers and an MCP server that exposes aggregated tools to external clients. This positions Bifrost as a central middleware layer for managing tools across your AI stack.

Security by Design: Explicit Tool Execution

Bifrost follows a strict “suggest, don’t execute” model. When an LLM proposes a tool call, nothing runs automatically.

Key security guarantees include:

• Tool calls returned by the LLM are only suggestions
• Your application reviews and approves every execution
• Tools run only via an explicit /v1/mcp/tool/execute call
• Every action is logged for auditing

This stateless, explicit flow prevents accidental API calls, unintended data changes, and silent side effects. A typical lifecycle looks like:

1. Send a chat request
2. LLM suggests tool calls
3. Your app validates and approves
4. Approved tools are executed
5. Results are fed back into the conversation

You always stay in control.

Flexible Connectivity for Any Setup

Bifrost supports multiple connection types to fit different architectures:

• STDIO for local tools, CLI utilities, and local MCP servers
• HTTP for remote services and microservice environments
• SSE for real-time and event-driven workflows

Each connection type includes built-in health checks, timeouts, and failure handling to ensure production reliability.

Code Mode: Cut LLM Costs in Half

At scale, traditional MCP becomes inefficient because every request includes large tool catalogs in the LLM context. Code Mode solves this by exposing just three meta-tools:

• listToolFiles
• readToolFile
• executeToolCode

Instead of reasoning over hundreds of tools, the model writes a small TypeScript program that orchestrates tools inside a sandbox. Tool definitions are loaded only when needed.

The impact is substantial:

• Around 50 percent reduction in token costs
• 30 to 40 percent faster execution
• Fewer LLM turns per workflow

Code Mode is available from v1.4.0-prerelease1 and is fully open source.

Agent Mode: Autonomous Execution with Guardrails

Agent Mode turns Bifrost into an agent runtime. When enabled, Bifrost can automatically execute pre-approved tools, feed results back to the model, and loop until completion.

Important safeguards include:

• No tool runs automatically by default
• Tools must be explicitly whitelisted and approved for auto-execution
• Destructive or side-effect-heavy actions should always require human approval

Agent Mode is best suited for safe, read-heavy workflows such as search, analysis, and information retrieval.

Enterprise-Grade Tool Governance

Bifrost offers layered access control through tool filtering:

1. Client-level filtering to define baseline tool access
2. Request-level filtering for dynamic, per-call control
3. Virtual Key filtering for per-user or per-team permissions

All filters apply together, ensuring precise and auditable tool access.

In-Process Tool Hosting for Ultra-Low Latency

When using the Go SDK, Bifrost allows you to register tools directly inside your application. These tools run in-process with near-zero latency and have direct access to application state.

This approach is ideal for business-specific logic, high-performance operations, and development workflows.

Expose Tools Through a Single MCP Endpoint

Gateway deployments can expose all connected tools through a single /mcp endpoint. External clients can access an aggregated toolset without managing multiple MCP servers.

Authentication and visibility are controlled using Virtual Keys, enabling secure multi-client access.

Open Source and Enterprise Options

The open source version includes full MCP Gateway functionality, Code Mode, Agent Mode, tool filtering, tool hosting, and health monitoring. Enterprise editions add advanced governance, observability, clustering, and compliance features.

Why It Matters

In real-world systems with dozens or hundreds of tools, Bifrost dramatically reduces cost, latency, and operational risk. Complex workflows that once required many LLM turns and large contexts can now be executed safely and efficiently.

Get Started

Deploy Bifrost as a centralized Gateway or embed it using the Go SDK for maximum performance. Its security-first architecture and cost-optimized execution make it a strong foundation for serious production AI systems.

Explore the open source project or try Bifrost Enterprise free for 14 days to start building reliable, scalable AI agents today.