GitLab 19.3 release

What it adds beyond the AI cluster

The existing summary captures the Duo/agent features well. What it omits is a substantial security, billing, and infrastructure payload that changes upgrade and adoption decisions. Release date August 20, 2026.

Security and secret handling

• GitLab Secrets Manager reaches Limited Availability on GitLab.com. Secrets are scoped per-job by environment, branch, and branch protection; it reuses existing group/project permissions and logs every create/update/read to the audit trail. It is a paid add-on billed through GitLab Credits (30-day trial available).
• Secret detection now scans full commit diffs on default-branch pushes when a prior commit ref is available, rather than only HEAD contents — closing the gap where a secret added and removed within the same push went undetected. Aligns default-branch behavior with MR/feature-branch scanning.
• GitLab Secret Scanning for Source Code (beta, Ultimate) ships a new GitLab-built engine that detects passwords and unstructured secrets outside standard rulesets, with heuristics to cut false positives. It replaces the default analyzer in the same secret_detection job; only high-confidence findings report during beta.
• Audit events for secret push protection fail-open (Ultimate): ruleset errors, file/line-limit overruns, scan timeouts now generate forwardable audit events.
• Disable OAuth DCR for MCP (Self-Managed/Dedicated): admins can now turn off Dynamic Client Registration via the application settings API, forcing pre-registered OAuth apps.

SAST / dependency coverage

• Advanced SAST for iOS (beta, Ultimate): Objective-C and Swift with interprocedural taint analysis, including taint paths that cross the Swift↔Objective-C boundary. Enable with GITLAB_ADVANCED_SAST_ENABLED: 'true'; the gitlab-advanced-sast-ext job runs automatically if those files exist.
• Dependency scanning for Bun (Ultimate) by parsing bun.lock (Bun 1.2 JSONC format). No extra config since Bun sources from npm; auto-remediation supported.
• SPDX license expressions in bring-your-own CycloneDX SBOMs now parse instead of showing "unknown" (e.g. MIT AND Apache-2.0, LicenseRef-[NAME]).

Infrastructure and CI

• PostgreSQL 18.4 available as opt-in for fresh Linux-package installs only — upgrades from existing installs are not yet supported. Check this before planning a version bump.
• Kubernetes 1.36 fully supported.
• Enforce merge trains: a single project-level setting blocks UI and REST bypasses; Owners/Admins can still override.
• New CI variables: CI_JOB_RETRY_COUNT (0 on first run) and CI_JOB_TAGS (the job's own tags, vs. runner-only CI_RUNNER_TAGS).
• New webhooks for MR reviews (changes.reviewers) and deployment approvals (blocked/approved/rejected; blocked in all tiers, others Premium/Ultimate, approver.email redacted).

Self-hosted model changes

• Devstral 2 deprecated for GitLab Duo Agent Platform Self-Hosted (Mistral deprecated it upstream); Mistral Medium 3.5 is the suggested alternative.
• Amazon Bedrock Mantle (beta) added as an OpenAI-compatible provider for self-hosted models.

Billing (act-before-surprise)

GitLab Credits usage caps are GA — the budget_caps_graphql_api feature flag is removed. When a cap is hit, Credit-consuming features (including Duo Agent Platform) are suspended until the next billing period or an admin raises the cap. Per-capability spend caps and 50/80/100% email alerts for Flex are also new. If you run Duo on Credits, set caps deliberately or usage will halt mid-period.

Limits

This is a release-notes page: each item links to docs/issues not reproduced here, so verify exact API shapes and setup steps before relying on them. Several features are beta (iOS SAST, source-code secret scanning, Agentic Chat UI, Bedrock Mantle) or Limited Availability (Secrets Manager), meaning behavior and coverage may still change.