Learn how to integrate an MCP gateway with Claude Code to consolidate tool access, enforce governance policies, and reduce token consumption across connected MCP servers. Claude Code has emerged as a standard terminal-based coding agent for engineering teams. Its built-in support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables interaction with filesystems, databases, GitHub, web search, Slack, internal APIs, and an expanding ecosystem of community-hosted tool servers. While connecting Claude Code to a small number of MCP servers is straightforward, scaling to dozens of servers introduces operational complexity. Each server requires separate credentials, configuration, and approval handling, leading to tool sprawl, fragmented governance, and limited visibility into costs. An MCP gateway resolves this by acting as a unified access layer in front of all upstream tool servers. Bifrost, an open-source AI gateway developed by Maxim AI, is designed specifically for this architecture.…