How DoorDash Built a Central Gateway for AI Agent Tool Access

MCP (Model Context Protocol) standardizes how AI agents describe, discover, and invoke tools, but it does not provide the authentication, authorization, credential management, access revocation, and auditing features required for actual operations.

DoorDash centralized these operational capabilities into an Agent Gateway. By configuring all tool calls to pass through the gateway, the following procedures are consistently applied:

• Caller authentication
• Verification of tool invocation permissions
• Access to approved tools
• Management of credentials and access rights
• Call logging and auditing

This structure places a control point between agents and individual tools, allowing authentication, authorization, and auditing policies to be managed centrally even as the number of tools grows.