Overview
- Databricks announced the expanded Unity AI Gateway on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, and made LLM-based guardrails plus AI Spend Controls available in beta while offering payload logging and MCP service policies through gated beta.
- LLM guardrails run model-powered checks on inputs and outputs to block or sanitize sensitive prompts, and teams can tune evaluator models and prompts to balance precision, recall, cost, and latency.
- Unity Catalog now governs Managed Cloud Platform tools by attaching SQL-defined service policies that evaluate each tool call by actor and context and return allow or deny decisions in real time.
- Payload logging writes full request and response data into Delta-managed inference tables in Unity Catalog, including blocked requests and per-request token and DBU cost attribution for audits and debugging.
- AI Spend Controls integrate with Databricks budgets to set per-user, per-workspace, per-use-case, and account thresholds with proactive alerts, and Databricks recommends gated beta enrollment and in-production tuning with account teams.