Google's A2A agent protocol joins Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation alongside MCP
Thirumalaivasan_GJ · reddit · 2026-10-22
A2A, Google's open protocol for agent-to-agent communication, is now a hosted project at the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, alongside MCP (Anthropic), goose (Block) and AGENTS.md (OpenAI).
- Timeline: A2A launched April 2025 and was donated to the Linux Foundation that June; v1.0 in March 2026 added multi-protocol bindings, version negotiation, multi-tenancy and signed agent cards; AAIF membership has grown from under 40 to 250+.
- Positioning: MCP is agent-to-tool, A2A is agent-to-agent — the project says they're complementary, not replacements.
- Ecosystem: Apache 2.0 licensed, with SDKs for Python, Go, Java, JS, .NET and Rust plus a CLI; steering committee includes AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others.
- Caveats via Forbes: changing hosts doesn't change control; enterprise authorization remains unstandardized, support depth varies, and adoption figures are vendor-reported rather than independently measured.
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