rpk ai: AI CLI & MCP Integration

Redpanda exposes two related AI surfaces under rpk:

1. rpk ai — a managed plugin (binary slug rpai) that gives a rich CLI for the Redpanda AI Gateway. rpk downloads it on first use and manages its lifecycle (install / upgrade / uninstall). The plugin receives cloud auth automatically from the active rpk profile.

2. rpk cloud mcp — an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server built directly into rpk that exposes Redpanda Cloud control-plane, IAM, dataplane, and AI Gateway operations as LLM-callable tools. Wire it into Claude Desktop or Claude Code and let an AI agent create topics, list clusters, manage ACLs, configure the AI Gateway, and more — all through natural language.

Quickstart

1. Install the rpk ai plugin

# Install the latest version (auto-downloaded on first subcommand too)
rpk ai install

# Pin a specific version
rpk ai install --ai-version 0.2.0