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Toolbeltspublic
Last verified 5 Nov 2026
Action Gateway connects applications and AI agents to tools through a managed MCP endpoint or SDK, with the accounts and permissions you choose. See What You Can Build for standalone agent examples.
An Action Gateway Toolbelt is a named, versioned group of tools. Use a Toolbelt to reuse a set of tools across endpoints and apply a permission rule to the group instead of configuring every tool separately.
For example, an issue-triage Toolbelt can group tools for reading GitHub issues and updating Linear. It can span providers and include only the operations the agent needs. Toolbelts are optional. Select individual tools when you do not need a reusable group.
Toolbelts and Connections
A Toolbelt and a connection let you reuse different parts of an agent’s setup:
| Resource | What you reuse |
|---|---|
| Toolbelt | Operations, such as reading GitHub issues and updating Linear. It contains no accounts or credentials. |
| Connection | Access to an account, such as a user’s GitHub account. It does not select which tools an endpoint can run. |
Two users can use the same issue-triage Toolbelt while each uses their own GitHub and Linear connections. Each endpoint’s actor ID identifies whose connections to use. Reusing the Toolbelt does not share account access.
Toolbelt Selection and Permissions
Toolbelts serve three related purposes when configuring an endpoint version:
- Tool selection: Include a Toolbelt to make its members available within the version’s selected tools.
- Group permissions: Set an
allow,ask, ordenyrule on the Toolbelt to apply that action to its member tools. - Preloading: Preload a Toolbelt to expose its permitted member tools directly to the model, without requiring a search first.
These are separate settings. Selecting a Toolbelt does not automatically allow every member, and adding a policy rule does not make tools outside the version’s selection available. Preloading changes which definitions the client receives, not which calls it can make.
A Toolbelt rule provides a common permission for the group. More-specific rules can change the action for an individual tool or particular arguments. For example, allow a group of repository tools but require approval for a tool that posts comments. An ask rule requests approval for the individual call, not blanket approval for the Toolbelt. See Tool Policies for rule precedence.
Versions and Reuse
Reference a Toolbelt by name and version, such as toolbelt:research@1. The version identifies a fixed set of member tools. Publishing a newer Toolbelt version does not change the version selected by an existing endpoint version.
Use the same versioned reference in the endpoint version’s tool selection, group policy, and preload configuration when those settings should apply to the same members. To adopt a different membership, publish an endpoint version that references the new Toolbelt version.
Tool Calls and Connections
A Toolbelt is not an executable workflow. The agent calls its member tools by their individual names, either directly, through Invoke Tool, or from Code Execution Tool.
Each call remains subject to the provider’s permissions, rate limits, and usage charges.
See Create Toolbelts to create a group and use it in an endpoint.