At the Open Source Summit North America, it was announced that Google donated its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to the Linux Foundation.
The A2A protocol offers a standard way for connecting agents to each other. In this way, it complements Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides a way to connect agents to different data sources and applications.
“Drawing on Google’s internal expertise in scaling agentic systems, we designed the A2A protocol to address the challenges we identified in deploying large-scale, multi-agent systems for our customers. A2A empowers developers to build agents capable of connecting with any other agent built using the protocol and offers users the flexibility to combine agents from various providers,” Google wrote in a blog post when it first launched A2A in April.
When it was first announced, Google revealed that there were over 50 partners contributing to the project, including Atlassian, Cohere, Datadog, Deloitte, Elastic, Oracle, and Salesforce. According to the Linux Foundation, there are now over 100 technology partners involved in the project.
By joining an organization like the Linux Foundation, the project will benefit from vendor neutrality and inclusive contributions. The organization will also continue the protocol’s focus on extensibility, security, and real-world usability.
“The Agent2Agent protocol establishes a vital open standard for communication, enabling the industry to build truly interoperable AI agents across diverse platforms and systems,” said Rao Surapaneni, vice president and GM of Business Applications Platform at Google Cloud. “By collaborating with the Linux Foundation and leading technology providers, we will enable more innovative and valuable AI capabilities under a trusted, open-governance framework.”
 protocol offers a standard way for connecting agents to each other, and was developed by Google.){kind=link}