This Agent2Agent Protocol (a "compliment" to Anthropic's Model Context Protocol?) seems to me to just be an attempt at a land grab in the line-protocol AI communication ecosystem.
If I'm reading it correctly, A2A is similar to MCP in that they both use JSONRPC but extends the capabilities for agents to be able to communicate with one another, potentially using separate backend models. MCP simply exposes applications data and workflows to a model itself and is not attempting to make agents communicate with one another.
The fact that A2A wasn't proposed as an extension to MCP seems disingenuous at best. To me, it looks like Google (among the other AI giants) is trying to create their own repository of agents, controlling the protocol, thereby enabling them to become the de-facto source for finding trusted agents.
Further, it comes off to me as a defense against the existential threat that AI poses to google's search and ads monopoly.
The problem is, as a consumer of AI, I don't want multiple agents communicating with one another. What I want is one model that communicates with non-agentic services. Making AI work well and understanding what it's doing is hard enough. You now want to pull in multiple models and companies into the picture? Talk about a risk management nightmare.
Shadow IT SaaS is already a massive problem for companies. Now imagine Shadow Agents doing work for your business using A2A to connect dozens of different unsupervised work for the company. No thanks!
For the inevitable defense of A2A "But it's open source and Apache licensed!". That's just bait. If you control the protocol, you control the ecosystem. See: Android, VSCode, Chromium, Java, Kubernetes, etc.
For me? I like my single-model audibility pulling in context using MCP. A2A just seems like an insane attempt at a land grab in the AI agent wars.
Agent2Agent in an unsupervised environment could easily lead to the first Agentic worms. It's not hard to imagine a few agents talking to one another with the right prompt injection attacks that could end up spreading to other agents via A2A.
This is of course just speculation but I could definitely see this as being a big enabler of that possibility.
If I'm reading it correctly, A2A is similar to MCP in that they both use JSONRPC but extends the capabilities for agents to be able to communicate with one another, potentially using separate backend models. MCP simply exposes applications data and workflows to a model itself and is not attempting to make agents communicate with one another.
The fact that A2A wasn't proposed as an extension to MCP seems disingenuous at best. To me, it looks like Google (among the other AI giants) is trying to create their own repository of agents, controlling the protocol, thereby enabling them to become the de-facto source for finding trusted agents.
Further, it comes off to me as a defense against the existential threat that AI poses to google's search and ads monopoly.
The problem is, as a consumer of AI, I don't want multiple agents communicating with one another. What I want is one model that communicates with non-agentic services. Making AI work well and understanding what it's doing is hard enough. You now want to pull in multiple models and companies into the picture? Talk about a risk management nightmare.
Shadow IT SaaS is already a massive problem for companies. Now imagine Shadow Agents doing work for your business using A2A to connect dozens of different unsupervised work for the company. No thanks!
For the inevitable defense of A2A "But it's open source and Apache licensed!". That's just bait. If you control the protocol, you control the ecosystem. See: Android, VSCode, Chromium, Java, Kubernetes, etc.
For me? I like my single-model audibility pulling in context using MCP. A2A just seems like an insane attempt at a land grab in the AI agent wars.