Databricks Unity AI Gateway GA, enhancing AI cost and governance

Unity AI Gateway is now generally available, offering enterprises unified control and cost management for AI agents and assets. It aims to address challenges related to exponential AI costs, security and IP risks, and vendor lock-in by providing end-to-end observability, granular cost attribution, and policy enforcement across AI interactions.

The Unity AI Gateway promotes an open, multi-AI approach, allowing developers freedom to choose models, providers, and AI tools without vendor lock-in. It extends Unity Catalog's governance across various AI assets, including Databricks-hosted and external models, coding agents, and skills, supporting native access to models from providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini.

The new Smart Routing feature, currently in Beta, helps organizations maximize their AI investment by dynamically routing requests to the most appropriate model based on quality, cost, performance, and availability. This aims to reserve expensive models for critical tasks while utilizing more efficient options for others, thereby improving value without compromising developer productivity.

Unity AI Gateway integrates with Unity Catalog to provide unified governance for both data and AI assets. This integration allows for centralized visibility and control, enabling teams to protect sensitive data, enforce policies, and investigate AI activity by combining identity, permissions, lineage, and auditing from Unity Catalog with runtime guardrails and contextual policies from the AI Gateway.