Harness and Kong Inc. have expanded their partnership to provide comprehensive API and AI security solutions. The collaboration extends beyond their existing API Gateway integration to include Kong AI Gateway, addressing security challenges in AI-driven architectures and autonomous agents. According to a 2025 report, 62% of enterprises lack visibility into their LLM usage, whilst 74% believe AI sprawl will surpass API sprawl in terms of risk. The expanded solution offers AI discovery, automatically inventorying AI assets routed through Kong AI Gateway, and AI protection through real-time behavioural analysis to detect threats like prompt injection and data exfiltration. The integration builds on the companies' existing API security partnership, applying similar security depth to AI infrastructure. Both the API Gateway and AI Gateway integrations are now generally available to joint customers.

Harness and Kong expand strategic partnership. July 23, 2026 Harness and Kong 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. 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. 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." 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." The Harness and Kong API Gateway integration is generally available now for all joint customers. The Kong AI Gateway integration, including AI Discovery and AI Protection, is also generally available now. Industry news. July 23, 2026 Azul announced that it will deliver monthly Critical Security Patch Updates (CSPUs) for Java Long-Term Support (LTS) versions for both Azul Core and Azul Prime, starting in August 2026. July 23, 2026 Prismatic announced native large data sync, a set of new capabilities that enables teams to move high volumes of customer data through the same integration platform they already use to build, deploy, monitor, and manage customer-facing integrations. July 23, 2026 Harness and Kong 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. July 22, 2026 Sauce Labs introduced AURA, its AI-Unified Release Assurance platform, to close that gap. July 22, 2026 Harness announced the Harness AppSec Alliance, a strategic partner ecosystem that brings together application security, API and Agent security capabilities on a single platform. July 22, 2026 Mirantis announced that both k0s, its lightweight single-binary Kubernetes distribution, and k0rdent, its open-source distributed container management platform, have achieved CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance at Kubernetes v1.35. July 21, 2026 Google introduced Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber to help developers and customers build AI agents in production with higher token efficiency, lower latency, and reliable performance. July 21, 2026 Harness is extending its platform to cover the full AI Agent Development Lifecycle (DLC), giving enterprises a single set of pipelines and controls to build, test, deploy, and run agents the same way they already ship everything else. July 21, 2026 BellSoft announced the general availability of a new hardened builder image for Paketo Buildpacks(TM). July 20, 2026 Testlio unveiled the next evolution of its AI-driven testing platform, LeoCore(TM). July 20, 2026 Agent Island released v1.7.1. July 17, 2026 GitLab(link is external) released GitLab 19.2. As AI generates more code, dependencies, and change than developers can keep up with, GitLab 19.2 brings agentic automation to clear that load. July 16, 2026 Progress Software(link is external) announced that its Progress Chef(link is external) platform now delivers enterprise lifecycle management and configuration capabilities for NVIDIA DGX Spark, enabling IT teams to securely provision, monitor and manage the desktop AI supercomputer at scale. July 16, 2026 Atlassian Corporation announced new capabilities in Jira to advance AI-native software development for every engineering organization. July 16, 2026 Intruder announced the launch of AI Pentesting for web applications, providing on-demand penetration testing.

Kong Inc., a developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, has opened new offices in Paris and Milan, driven by strong growth across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The company reported a 72% year-over-year increase in its regional customer base and expanded its headcount by 71% over the past two years. The Milan office will function as an engineering hub supporting R&D, product innovation, and customer success. The location marks a return to the city where co-founders Augusto Marietti and Marco Palladino started the company. Notable new customers include ING Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Mistral, and PolyAI. Kong now has employees in 14 countries across EMEA, with expanded offices in London and Budapest alongside the new Paris and Milan locations.