Google’s A2A Open Standard Joins the Agentic AI Foundation, Enabling Collaboration with Other Open Agent Infrastructure Projects

Google and the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) announced that Google’s Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) is joining the AAIF—putting A2A under the same roof as MCP and other open agent infrastructure projects.

A2A is an open standard that defines how agents communicate across framework and vendor boundaries. An agent publishes an agent card containing a structured description of what it can do and how to reach it. Other agents read that card, discover capabilities, and delegate tasks without a human brokering the handoff. The exchange is structured, observable, and framework agnostic, according to Google and AAIF.

Now, the next phase of agentic AI depends less on the models themselves and more on the infrastructure that allows them to work together.

Google launched A2A in April 2025 and donated it to the Linux Foundation with founding organizations including AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow.

In August 2025, IBM's Agent Communication Protocol merged into A2A showing that the field was moving toward a single shared standard rather than competing ecosystems.

A2A v1.0, the first stable specification, shipped in March 2026. It added multi-protocol bindings and version negotiation, multi-tenancy, and signed agent cards for cryptographic identity verification.

MCP standardizes how agents connect to tools and data, while A2A standardizes how agents communicate with each other. Together, they form key pieces of the infrastructure needed for large-scale, multi-agent systems.

A2A is already running in production across mobile platforms, cloud AI infrastructure, financial services, supply chain, and enterprise IT.

Beyond mobile platforms, A2A is built into the leading cloud AI platforms. Google Cloud supports developing and deploying A2A agents through ADK, Agent Engine, Cloud Run, and GKE.

Microsoft Azure AI Foundry lets agents expose A2A endpoints and find external agents through standard discovery. AWS Bedrock AgentCore can host and operate A2A servers, so agents built with different frameworks or hosted in different clouds can communicate through the same protocol.

Google Cloud and PayPal are extending A2A into agentic commerce through the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). Shopping and merchant agents communicate over A2A throughout product discovery, pricing, and order fulfillment, with AP2 providing the payment authorization layer.

AAIF‘s projects each cover distinct layers of the open agentic stack. This includes:

Instructions and context: AGENTS.md standardizes how projects communicate expectations, conventions, and operating instructions to AI agents.

Agent runtime: goose provides the environment in which an agent reasons, plans, invokes capabilities, and carries out work.

Agent to tool connectivity: MCP standardizes how agents connect to and interact with tools, data sources, applications, and services.

Traffic mediation and control: agentgateway handles operations. It sits at the boundary between agent systems and the infrastructure they run on, managing routing, policy, and observability.

Agent to agent interoperability: A2A adds an agent to agent interoperability layer by standardizing how independent agents discover one another, communicate, delegate tasks, and exchange results across systems and organizational boundaries.

“As organizations move multi-platform agentic systems into production, interoperability is becoming essential,” said Rao Surapaneni, VP and general manager, business application platforms, Google Cloud. “A2A enables agents to easily discover, delegate, and collaborate across frameworks and siloed platforms, without custom integrations. Bringing A2A to the Agentic AI Foundation further empowers enterprises to build and scale agentic systems on a truly open foundation.”

For teams building multi-agent systems, this removes a specific category of risk. The protocol agents depend on for cross-framework communication isn't subject to a single vendor's product decisions, AAIF said.

For more information about this news, visit https://aaif.io.