Busbar 1.6 is almost here

It’s been quiet here, and that’s on purpose. For the last stretch we’ve had our heads down on the biggest release Busbar has shipped, and I didn’t want to talk about it until I was sure of the shape. I’m sure now.

Busbar 1.6 lands in about a week. This is the release where Busbar stops being a control plane for model calls and becomes the control plane for the whole agentic stack: the models, the tools they reach for, and the other agents they hand work to. Same binary, same discipline, a much bigger surface. Here’s what’s arriving and why I’m excited about it.

Control what AI can do before it acts.

That line is the whole idea, and 1.6 is us making it true across everything an agent touches, not just the model call.

Tools, through one governed front door

Agents don’t just talk anymore. They do things: read a file, open a ticket, run a query. MCP is how they ask a tool server to act, and every one of those actions is real. It reads data, spends budget, or changes state.

1.6 brings MCP into Busbar as a first-class protocol, in both directions: Busbar can be the client your agents call through, and the server your tools are published behind. Either way, every tool call goes through one boundary that checks it, counts it, and records it.

That boundary earns its keep. A tool you approved once can’t quietly become something else: Busbar fingerprints every tool and re-checks it, and if a server rewrites a tool’s description out from under you, that tool stops serving until a person approves the change. A caller with no grant for a tool never even learns it exists. And the credential your agent logs in with never travels upstream to a tool server. Busbar presents its own, scoped to that one call.

One front door for every tool your agents touch, with the answer to “what is this allowed to do, and who pays for it” built in rather than bolted on. See what MCP looks like in Busbar.

Delegation, under the same guardrails

Sooner or later your agents work with agents that aren’t yours. A2A is how they find each other, through a published card that claims who an agent is.

The trouble with a card is that you usually trust it once and then forget about it. Busbar doesn’t. It verifies that card, pins it, and re-checks it on your own clock, so you trust a remote agent continuously, not once. If the card drifts, that agent is quarantined until you look. When your agent delegates a task, Busbar leases a credential scoped to that hop instead of passing yours through, and it records every task in a chain that can’t be quietly edited.

The point is that delegating work to an agent you don’t own runs under exactly the same guardrails as everything else. Whose code is running, who authorized it, what it’s allowed to touch, and who pays. Those are the questions Busbar already answers for model traffic, and now they hold across agents too. More on continuous trust for remote agents.

Real-time voice is coming to the platform

Busbar already handles audio as a modality on the model side. The next thing we’re bringing is the live one: real-time voice, arriving on the platform in this release line.

I want to be honest about where that sits. Voice is the direction, not a box I’m ticking today, and I’d rather tell you it’s on the way than pretend it’s finished. But it’s the piece I’m most excited to get into your hands, because a real-time voice agent is exactly the kind of workload that needs a governed boundary: it’s fast, it’s stateful, and it’s talking to real people. Watch this space.

One place to see every Busbar you run

The last thing, and maybe the one that changes the day-to-day most, is Busbar Console: a cloud SaaS platform for monitoring every Busbar deployment you run, from one place.

Busbar keeps enforcing AI execution inside your own infrastructure. Your traffic and your provider credentials still flow through Busbar, not through us. What Console adds is a single place to see it: the health, governance activity, usage, and cost of every Busbar deployment, and the evidence of what Busbar allowed, limited, refused, or quarantined, all in one view.

Console is 100% optional and never sits in the hot path. It manages the boundary; Busbar stays on the path. If Console is ever unavailable, Busbar keeps enforcing its last approved configuration locally and nothing on the request path notices. And it never changes a connected Busbar without your explicit approval, with configuration history and rollback when you do. For teams that can’t send anything outside their walls, Console can also be deployed on-prem for Enterprise — the same single pane of glass, entirely inside your own network.

This is the answer to the question I hear most: compliance shouldn’t be a reconstruction project. Every request, every team, one place to look. Console is free to start.

Almost there

1.6 is a milestone for us. It’s the release where the same trust chain we built for model calls, signed code, verified identity, enforced budgets, evidence that holds up, reaches out across tools and agents, with a cloud console to watch all of it and real-time voice on the way.

It ships in about a week, and a brand-new website is landing alongside it to walk through all of this properly, every plane, every guarantee, with the depth this release deserves. More very soon.