Databricks Ships Unity AI Gateway: MCP Governance with On-Behalf-Of Agent Permissions, Fine-Grained Tool Access Control, and End-to-End Agent Observability

Databricks Blog·medium signal

Databricks merged AI Gateway into Unity Catalog as Unity AI Gateway, extending enterprise governance to agentic AI by controlling which agents access which MCP servers, APIs, and LLMs with the same permissions model used for data. The key feature is on-behalf-of (OBO) user execution for MCP calls, ensuring agents operate with the requesting user's permissions rather than broad service credentials, preventing unauthorized data access. The platform provides a unified API across models with built-in fallbacks, rate limits, guardrails, and end-to-end observability that attributes costs across models, teams, and workflows.