ACP Explained: The Vendor-Neutral Backbone for Cooperative AI

As AI agents grow more autonomous and interconnected, there's an increasingly urgent need for more structured communication. That’s why protocols like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tool interaction and Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) initiative are gaining serious traction.

A new protocol called Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) — originally proposed by IBM Research and now hosted under the Linux Foundation — enters this landscape with a focus on inter-agent coordination, allowing agents to exchange goals, data, and tasks through a vendor-neutral, HTTP-based API.

Whether you’re an AI researcher or someone who is simply curious about the future of intelligent systems, this is your guide to how ACP will shape the emerging ecosystem of cooperative agents from robotics to enterprise automation. Today's newsletter will cover:

• Why there's a need for structured Agent-to-Agent communication

• Existing A2A communication efforts such as Anthropic’s MCP and Google’s A2A

• What ACP brings to the table and the different domains it's already impacting

• The future of A2A communication