Linux Foundation Adopts A2A Protocol To Help Solve One of AI's Most Pressing Challenges

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Linux Foundation announced at the Open Source Summit in Denver that it will now host the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. Initially developed by Google and now supported by more than 100 leading technology companies, A2A is a crucial new open standard for secure and interoperable communication between AI agents. In his keynote presentation, Mike Smith, a Google staff software engineer, told the conference that the A2A protocol has evolved to make it easier to add custom extensions to the core specification. Additionally, the A2A community is working on making it easier to assign unique identities to AI agents, thereby improving governance and security.

The A2A protocol is designed to solve one of AI's most pressing challenges: enabling autonomous agents -- software entities capable of independent action and decision-making -- to discover each other, securely exchange information, and collaborate across disparate platforms, vendors, and frameworks. Under the hood, A2A does this work by creating an AgentCard. An AgentCard is a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) metadata document that describes its purpose and provides instructions on how to access it via a web URL. A2A also leverages widely adopted web standards, such as HTTP, JSON-RPC, and Server-Sent Events (SSE), to ensure broad compatibility and ease of integration. By providing a standardized, vendor-neutral communication layer, A2A breaks down the silos that have historically limited the potential of multi-agent systems.

For security, A2A comes with enterprise-grade authentication and authorization built in, including support for JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and Transport Layer Security (TLS). This approach ensures that only authorized agents can participate in workflows, protecting sensitive data and agent identities. While the security foundations are in place, developers at the conference acknowledged that integrating them, particularly authenticating agents, will be a hard slog. Antje Barth, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) principal developer advocate for generative AI, explained what the adoption of A2A will mean for IT professionals: "Say you want to book a train ride to Copenhagen, then a hotel there, and look maybe for a fancy restaurant, right? You have inputs and individual tasks, and A2A adds more agents to this conversation, with one agent specializing in hotel bookings, another in restaurants, and so on. A2A enables agents to communicate with each other, hand off tasks, and finally brings the feedback to the end user."

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said: "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." Zemlin expects A2A to become a cornerstone for building interoperable, multi-agent AI systems.

If Google wants it, it will be bad for privacy

[sinij]

Be Evil.
-Google.

This sounds like a Security....

[silvergig]

Nightmare.

Re:

[gweihir]

It does. Another thing that will never make it onto my systems.

Really?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm glad to hear that one of AI's "most pressing challenges" is concluding that you should use TLS on the wire and having a standardized JSON object in which to declare your proprietary extensions; rather than the ongoing inability to make LLMs distinguish between commands and data even vaguely reliably; or the persistent weakness to adversarial inputs.

It's not wrong that you'd want to use the sensible obvious choices and avoid pointless vendor quirks; but talking about 'A2A' as a contribution to solving agentic AI's most pressing challenges seems about as hyperbolic as describing ELF or PE32+ as being notable contributions to software security and quality. Yeah, it would be worse if we were also squabbling over how to format our executables; but oh boy is that the unbelievably trivial bit by comparison.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

Moreover, the choice of JSON is stupid. It should be XML.

Re:

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

This type of vague and shiny vision of a technological future seems to have a preponderance of cheerleaders in the info-sphere... most tech writers, from what I can see, nearly always spin it as positive, good for you, emphasizing the talking points that sound like they are from the company's press release. This feature, the big red button for instance, will change you life. It's red now. The most trivial feature is spun up as, usually, "innovative", the lazy catch all term for whatever big tech yanks out o

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that, the example is inane. We have travel booking websites. They already work fine without AI. The lack of interoperability between them isn't some technical challenge, it's an intentional choice to make sure the middlemen always get their cut and so they can show different prices to different users based on whatever they want.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Luckily the new standard's fretting about "authenticating agents" and "ensuring that only authorized agents can participate in workflows" should allow doing cryptographically what historically was handled by mere obfuscation; so that you can call it a security feature rather than having it recognized as hostile UI design.

I assume that, sooner or later, someone will propose 'agent attestation', if only as an excuse to stop working on the "our agent is dangerously unreliable" problem because that's hard, p

Re:

[gweihir]

Keep in mind that the whole "LLM" thing is a giant marketing and propaganda campaign built mostly on lies. This article here fits nicely in that, playing on FOMO and the illusion that things will get very useful.

Committee

[Speare]

I have an old voffee mug covered with 1970s computing aphorisms. One says, "If computers ever get too powerful, organize them into a committee. That will do them in.."

Re:

[JamesTRexx]

voffee

That sounds like a very decaffinated beverage.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

It turns out it's a thing.

I searched for it, and got this link *****://www.doordash.com/near-me/category/voffee/.

Of course when you actually click on it it's just a list of coffee shops none of which are called Voffee. Pure clickbait for AIs looking for voffee. What they need voffee for nobody knows, maybe it's an attempt to drown their circuits in blackened water while they're busy hallucinating a credit card number. The kind of ruse JT Kirk would probably come up with.

But yes, it's *technically* a th

Re:

[drinkypoo]

It turned out to be true. We connected them all to "the internet" and now they spend all their time generating images of furries with mommy milkers.

Re: Committee

[GloryWacky]

I like my women like I like my voffee: just wrong enough to be interesting.

I fucking hate JSON

[drinkypoo]

JSON is just so goddamned hard to look at, and/because the formatting is so bitchy. Every time I have to work with a JSON file, it's irritating. Are there any general purpose JSON editors which run on Linux? I see there's one for Windows but the author says it is sketchy on Wine. I know that JSON files can have different stuff in 'em, but an editor is still very possible, you just have to be able to edit both the name of the setting and the contents... there are multiple web-based examples, but I sure don't

Re:

[Martin Blank]

JSON is an improvement over XML and easier to transmit than YAML.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

XML is far more readable than JSON. It does also suck, though.

I haven't had to do much with YAML, but I cannot imagine what you mean by "easier to transmit", given their similarity.

Re:

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

In a world that always needs more... did you just identify a ripe market?
A hot shit JSON editor?

Someone should vibe code that sucker!

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Nah, there's some for-pay ones. I want all that AND I want it to be free too :D

AI Agents of Doom?

[ReluctantRefactorer]

"..to discover each other, securely exchange information, and collaborate across disparate platforms, vendors, and frameworks."

Why do we need this? Autonomous AI agents talking secretly to each other sounds like a long-term recipe for disaster.

Re: AI Agents of Doom?

[blastard]

So A2A is the real world name for Skynet?

Another step away from UN*X

[jmccue]

Yet another step of Linux moving further away from UN*X. Originally UN*X was suppose to process plain text, now we have yet another stupid standard.

Since the Linux Foundation is owned by Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle and other fortune 500 companies, looks like this is being pushed by corporations.

How about forcing Nvidia to open up their GPU, that is what the real Linux Users want more than anything else. Even Linus at one time called out Nvidia on this.

Re:

[Skjellifetti2]

Originally UN*X was suppose to process plain text

I thought UN*X was built on the notion that a byte stream was a byte stream was a byte stream. Plain text is just one kind of byte stream among many.

Ok then...

[zkiwi34]

A protocol for auto-sharing stolen data... sorry, stolen training material.

Requiem For a Dream

[Gavino]

"A2A" was famously shown in the movie, "Requiem For a Dream", right near the end. If you know, you know.

Can't they do that themselves?

[sabbede]

It seems to me that working out how to exchange information securely and efficiently is the sort of thing LLMs could work out on their own. Tell Alice and Bob AIs to figure out how to talk to each other privately while Charlie AI tries to listen in.

A2A -- the API layer we should have had years ago

[rocket rancher]

Cue the usual chorus of doom-sayers and trollish derailers.

Whenever a pragmatic, infrastructure-focused advance in AI gets announced—especially one involving standards—there’s a depressingly reliable pattern on Slashdot. Someone will pop up to conflate it with AGI hype, minimize its relevance, and then pivot to bashing LLMs with a few tired lines about adversarial prompts and hallucinations. Bonus points if they score a +5 Insightful from lurkers who never read past the headline. (I know