Updated 09:35 with comment from Outshift by Cisco
With the launch of Google’s AI Agent communication protocol at its annual NEXT event, significant attention has turned to the issue it highlights, how to get the ever growing list of AI Agents, designed by a variety of companies, to get along.
The question is not new, in fact in 2024, a CISCO-led project known as AGNTCY launched its Agent Connect Protocol (ACP) to facilitate this “internet of agents” in partnerships with organisations such as LangChain and LlamaIndex.
AI company Anthropic followed shortly after with its Model Context Protocol (MCP), which saw a big boom in acceptance after it was adopted by OpenAI in March 2025.
Enter Google (and Deloitte, and Oracle, and...)
Then, this April Google launched its Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, which it hopes will become an industry standard and already has the backing of a whole list of companies including Oracle, MongoDB, KPMG, and Deloitte.
While Google has been keen to position A2A as complimentary to the more data-centric MCP, it hasn’t said the same about AGNTCY’s protocol, opening up the door for some healthy protocol competition.
Or, as Sudhanshu Sharma, Lead MLOps Engineer at E.ON Energie Deutschland tells The Stack: “It’s going to be war.”
