Google donates Agent2Agent Protocol to the Linux Foundation

Google LLC’s cloud unit has donated the Agent2Agent Protocol, a technology that facilitates interactions between artificial intelligence agents, to the Linux Foundation.

The search giant announced the move on Monday at the Open Source Summit North America conference in Denver.

“This move is designed to accelerate the adoption and development of the A2A protocol by providing a robust framework for open collaboration, intellectual property management, and long-term stewardship,” a group of Google executives wrote in a blog post today.

Some applications use multiple AI agents to automate tasks for users. A network troubleshooting tool, for example, might leverage one agent to diagnose issues in routers and another to fix switch malfunctions. To find the root cause of an error that affects both routers and switches, the two agents may have to share technical data with one another.

Enabling agents to coordinate their work historically required developers to write complicated custom code. Google’s Agent2Agent Protocol, or A2A, software is designed to ease the task. It provides prepackaged features for moving data between agents that spare developers the hassle of writing everything from scratch.

Google says that A2A lends itself to a wide range of AI use cases. If an agent struggles to process a prompt, it can use the protocol to route the request to another agent with a more relevant feature set. According to the company, A2A-powered agents can also collaborate on more involved tasks that require human input and may require days to complete.

A2A packages the data that it transmits between agents into the JSON file format. JSON is widely used to move information between applications because of its relative simplicity and low memory footprint, which reduces bandwidth consumption. It’s also more secure than XML, a popular technology used for the same task.

JSON files that agents share with one another via A2A can include not only text but also multimodal data. An agent could, for example, send a coding assistant a sketch of a user interface element and instructions to implement it in CSS. The coding assistant could then use A2A to return the requested CSS snippet. Data is sent over the HTTP version of a network protocol called JSON-RPC 2.0 that is optimized to move JSON files.

A2A provides three ways of sharing files and instructions between agents.

There’s a so-called synchronous mode for simple agent interactions, such as those that involve a single prompt response. The two other modes, in turn, are geared toward more complex tasks that require a significant amount of time to complete. An A2A-powered agent that performs such a task can provide updates whenever it completes a key substep.

Google says that A2A is designed to complement another open-source agent communications protocol known as the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It was introduced late last year by Anthropic PBC. Whereas A2A is designed to facilitate interactions between agents, MCP allows agents to interact with other types of applications such as databases. 

Alongside the A2A specification, Google is donating accompanying software development kits and tooling to the Linux Foundation. According to the nonprofit, the project is already backed by a half dozen major tech firms besides the Alphabet Inc. unit. The group includes Amazon Web Services Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., ServiceNow Inc., Salesforce Inc. and SAP SE.

“By joining the Linux Foundation, A2A is ensuring the long-term neutrality, collaboration and governance that will unlock the next era of agent-to-agent powered productivity,” said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.

Image: Google

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