What Is an MCP Gateway — and Why Do Enterprise AI Teams Need One in 2026?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was released by Anthropic in November 2024. Eighteen months later, it had 97 million monthly SDK downloads as of December 2025, backing from every major AI lab, and is now governed as a founding project of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. That adoption happened fast, even faster than most protocols manage. But it created an immediate problem: connecting AI agents directly to dozens of MCP servers at scale is operationa