Name: AgentProto

Description

This is a placeholder in case the current charter discussions have not finalized.

Previous request (IETF 126 BoF): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-krishnan-agent-communication-protocols/

With the expansion of communication over the Internet between AI Agents and external resources, reliable communications across platforms and vendors becomes increasingly important. The role of the this effort is to facilitate such interoperability so that tools and agents can be provided by multiple vendors. The Agent Communication Protocols effort will work on defining protocol building blocks for enabling interoperability for AI Agent applications across the Internet.

Required Details

• Status: WG forming
• Responsible AD: Charles Eckel <eckelcu@cisco.com>
• BOF proponents:
• Leslie Daigle<ldaigle@thinkingcat.com>
• Orie Steele <orie@or13.io>
• Cullen Jennings <fluffy@iii.ca>
• Jonathan Rosenberg <jdrosen@jdrosen.net>
• Suresh Krishnan <suresh.krishnan@gmail.com>
• Dapeng Liu <max.ldp@alibaba-inc.com>
• Zaheduzzaman Sarker <zaheduzzaman.sarker@nokia.com>
• Lionel Morand <lionel.morand@huawei.com>
• Kehan Yao <yaokehan@chinamobile.com>
• Arashmid Akhavain <arashmid.akhavain@huawei.com>
• Hesham Moussa <hesham.moussa@huawei.com>
• Number of people expected to attend: 100
• Length of session (1 or usually 2 hours): 2 hours
• Conflicts (whole Areas and/or WGs)
• Chair Conflicts: moq
• Technology Overlap: oauth, wimse, quic, webtrans, webbotauth, aipref
• Key Participant Conflict: TBD

Information for IAB/IESG

• Any protocols or practices that already exist in this space:

Agentic AI Foundation (Home of MCP)
https://aaif.io

Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol
https://a2a-protocol.org/latest/
https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A

AGNTCY
https://agntcy.org
https://github.com/agntcy

Model Context Protocol (MCP)
https://modelcontextprotocol.io/
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol

Open Agent Auth
https://alibaba.github.io/open-agent-auth/

• Which (if any) modifications to existing protocols or practices are required:

This effort is expected to work on a protocol for creation and maintenance of long-lived sessions between AI agents, or between AI agents and tools. These sessions allow for the bidirectional exchange of data, including model context, tool call results, and chat messages. It is anticipated that this protocol will utilize modern IETF application transfer protocols, such as QUIC, WebTransport, WebRTC and MOQ, and might require some modifications or additions.

• Which (if any) entirely new protocols or practices are required:

This effort is expected to work on a protocol for creation and maintenance of long-lived sessions between AI agents, or between AI agents and tools. These sessions allow for the bidirectional exchange of data, including model context, tool call results, and chat messages. It is anticipated that this protocol will utilize modern IETF application transfer protocols, such as QUIC, WebTransport, WebRTC and MOQ, based on the anticipated use cases.

• Open source projects (if any) implementing this work:

• Co-ordination with Open source work:

The proponents recognize the importance of close coordination between IETF standardization work and the open source projects listed, several of which are hosted by or affiliated with the Linux Foundation. Several of the proponents have been working closely with these open source projects in order to gather requirements and preferences, in order to improve the ability of the IETF to define the necessary building blocks that these open source projects can adopt and deploy. We expect to have ongoing information exchange and co-ordination with these projects by way of common participants between the projects and the IETF working group(s) in this space.

Agenda

• TBD: Items, Internet-Drafts, speakers, timing
• Or a URL

Links to the mailing list, draft charter if any (for WG-forming BoF), relevant Internet-Drafts, etc.

• Mailing List: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/agentproto/
• Draft charter: https://github.com/ietf-artarea/charters/blob/main/agentproto/charter.md

Relevant Internet-Drafts:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rosenberg-aiproto-framework/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-jennings-ai-mcp-over-moq/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-klrc-aiagent-auth/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-liu-agent-operation-authorization/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-liu-agent-protocol-over-moq/
https://github.com/maxpassion/IETF-Agent-Operation-Authorization-draft
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-agentic-ai-usecases-requirements/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yao-catalist-problem-space-analysis/