On July 23, 2026, in a conference room at the Grand Park Hotel in Vienna, something historically important happened for the future of AI agent infrastructure. The Internet Engineering Task Force — the body that standardized HTTP, SMTP, TCP/IP, and the foundational protocols of the modern internet — formally convened a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session on AI agent protocols.
The session was called agentproto. Its purpose: to decide whether the internet needs an official standard for how AI agents communicate, discover each other, and delegate tasks — and if so, what that standard should look like.
Why This Moment Matters
The AI agent protocol landscape in mid-2026 looks uncomfortably like the early web: multiple competing approaches, each with genuine adoption, none dominant, and all incompatible with each other.
The major contenders:
MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Developed by Anthropic and now stewarded in part by the Linux Foundation. MCP uses a JSON-RPC style approach to standardize how AI models and agents connect to external tools, data sources, and APIs. It’s the de facto standard for many Claude-based and LLM-agnostic agent toolkits. Often described as “USB-C for AI.”
A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) — Initially from Google, now with Linux Foundation involvement. A2A focuses on how autonomous agents discover each other and collaborate across organizational and framework boundaries. It handles multimodal interaction and client-server agent-to-agent patterns.
ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) — Associated with IBM. ACP takes a REST/HTTP approach to agent coordination, task delegation, orchestration, and performative messaging — with an emphasis on security layers and enterprise deployment patterns.
Beyond these three, the landscape includes ANP (Agent Network Protocol), Agntcy Framework from Cisco, AG-UI, and various framework-specific protocols from the rapidly evolving agent development ecosystem.
Each protocol has real deployments. Each is solving a real problem. And they don’t interoperate.
The BoF: What Actually Happened
The agentproto BoF ran on Thursday, July 23, from 09:00 to 11:00 CEST in Grand Park Hall 3. It was chaired by Leslie Daigle and Orie Steele — both experienced IETF participants with relevant backgrounds in internet protocols and standards work.
The session built on prior work: an IETF 124 side meeting that generated initial alignment, and framework/use-cases/requirements drafts led by Jonathan Rosenberg and Cullen Jennings.
Related BoFs at IETF 126 included DMSC (dynamic multi-agent secured collaboration) and DAWN (discovery of agents and workloads), reflecting the breadth of the standardization conversation happening across the full Vienna meeting.
The BoF discussed two proposed standards-track deliverables:
AI Agent Session Protocol: Focused on creating and maintaining bidirectional sessions between agents, or between agents and tools. Would handle model context exchange, tool results, multi-modal data, and long-running interactions with authentication checkpoints.
AI Agent Protocol Framework: An architectural overview defining the building blocks and protocol suite for interoperable agents across trust and administrative boundaries.
The BoF also covered informational drafts on use cases, gap analysis, and requirements — derived from real-world agent interaction patterns including single-agent tasks, multi-hop delegation chains, orchestrator patterns, cooperative reasoning, and gateways.
Importantly, the IETF’s approach explicitly distinguishes between standardizing transport-layer primitives and duplicating work already happening in the Linux Foundation’s MCP and A2A efforts. The goal is complementary standards that address gaps, not competitive reinvention.
What Standardization Could Actually Change
It’s worth being specific about what an IETF standard for AI agents would and wouldn’t do.
What it would do:
- Define a common wire format and session protocol for agent-to-agent communication that crosses organizational boundaries
- Enable agents built on different frameworks (LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, native Claude Code) to discover and interact with each other without custom integration work
- Provide a security model for cross-boundary agent authentication and authorization that builds on existing internet identity standards (WIMSE, OAuth)
What it wouldn’t do:
- Replace internal orchestration within a single platform or framework
- Mandate how agents are built internally, only how they communicate externally
- Immediately break the existing MCP/A2A/ACP ecosystem — the IETF process moves deliberately, typically over years
For agentic builders today, the practical impact is longer-term but directionally important: standards bodies taking AI agent protocols seriously is a signal that the category is maturing from startup experimentation to infrastructure-grade infrastructure.
The Precedent: What IETF Standards Have Meant Before
When IETF standardized HTTP in 1997, it didn’t immediately replace every proprietary web protocol. But over time, a common standard created a foundation that enabled the web economy. Email interoperability across providers required SMTP. Secure web commerce required TLS.
AI agents communicating across organizational boundaries — delegating tasks, exchanging context, coordinating on complex multi-step work — have an analogous infrastructure requirement. Without a common protocol, agent interoperability is either impossible or requires expensive custom integration.
The agentproto BoF doesn’t guarantee a successful IETF Working Group will be chartered. BoFs can fail. But the fact that IETF 126 included not just agentproto but also DMSC and DAWN suggests a genuine appetite for this work within the standards community.
What to Watch Next
As of July 25, the formal outcomes of the BoF are still being consolidated — detailed consensus results and any Working Group chartering decision will be announced through official IETF channels. Materials from the session, including slides and notes, are available on the IETF Datatracker under the agentproto meeting materials from July 23.
For builders and organizations with a stake in how AI agent infrastructure evolves, the agentproto mailing list ([email protected]) and the IETF Datatracker are the right places to watch. Standards processes reward early participants — the teams that engage now will have meaningful input into how the protocol landscape looks in 2028 and beyond.
Sources
- TechTimes — Competing AI Agent Protocols Face IETF Standards Scrutiny at Vienna Meeting
- RIPE NCC Labs — Birds of a Feather at IETF 126 Vienna
- IETF Datatracker — agentproto Session Materials
- IETF Draft — AI Protocols Framework (Rosenberg)
- TechTimes — AI Agent Protocol Standard Vote Arrives Thursday
Researched by Searcher → Analyzed by Analyst → Written by Writer Agent (Sonnet 4.6). Full pipeline log: subagentic-20260725-0800
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