Two of the most influential interoperability standards for AI agents are now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation, marking a major step towards an open, interconnected agent ecosystem. The nonprofit organization announced on Tuesday that it is now custodian of the AGNTCY project, an initiative backed by Cisco, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Gaileo, and Glean. This move follows Google’s recent decision to donate its Agent2Agent protocol to the foundation as well.
The Linux Foundation is receiving the complete AGNTCY framework, from agent discovery and identification to messaging and observability. Moreover, the project’s so-called building blocks have been modified to work with Agent2Agent and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). This means that A2A-enabled agents and MCP servers are now available on AGNTCY directories, can transport messages using AGNTCY’s Secure Low-Latency Interactive Messaging (SLIM), and can be monitored using AGNTCY’s SDKs.
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Launched in March, AGNTCY aimed to help autonomous agents discover each other, verify identities, and share context without time-consuming and costly integration work. AI’s acceleration is only creating more fragmentation among platforms, and this lack of standards could create chaos. “The missing piece isn’t smarter agents—it’s building the Internet of Agents: an open, interoperable, agent-to-agent, quantum-safe infrastructure,” Vijoy Pandey, Cisco’s senior vice president and the head of its incubation engine Outshift, writes in a blog post.
“The Linux Foundation provides neutral governance that enterprises trust and a proven sustainability model that keeps critical projects alive.”
How will the organization deal with overseeing two agent interoperability standards? Will it merge A2A with AGNTCY? Probably not, as the Linux Foundation may prefer to be neutral, supporting both and allowing the community to sort things out naturally. The two could co-exist in separate lanes, with the former tackling agentic communication and the latter being more infrastructure-focused. Regardless, the donation of AGNTCY and A2A to a nonprofit could eliminate concerns some developers may have about building according to a potential competitor’s standards. With the Linux Foundation in control, the agentic ecosystem can be more harmonious, helping users be more productive.
“We’ve been building AGNTCY’s evaluation and observability components from day one because reliable agents cannot scale without purpose-built monitoring. Moving all components of AGNTCY to the Linux Foundation ensures these tools serve the entire ecosystem, not just our customers,” Yash Sheth, Galileo’s co-founder, adds. “As a founding member of AGNTCY, we’re eager to see neutral governance accelerate adoption of standards we know enterprises need for production agent deployments.”
In addition to assuming control of AGNTCY, the Linux Foundation is expanding its membership. Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle, and Red Hat have been named as “formative members,” joining more than 75 other firms working on the project.
Developers interested in using AGNTCY’s code can access it on GitHub.
Featured Image: An AI-generated image of interconnected wires between computer ports. Credit: Adobe Firefly
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