The two protocols your agents speak now belong to nobody
Google has formally handed its A2A protocol, the standard for how agents built by different vendors discover each other and coordinate work. Both halves of the agent stack now sit under neutral governance: MCP for how an agent reaches tools and data, A2A for how agents talk to each other across organisational boundaries. The foundation launched in December 2025 with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, AWS and Block, and says it has gone from 49 members to over 250 in under a year.
What it actually means
Nothing you can build this week that you couldn't build last week. This is a governance announcement, not a capability one, and 250 members is a membership number, not a compatibility number. What did change is who can move the goalposts. Last week the neutral layer everyone routes their model traffic through got bought - Stripe. This week the layer everyone's agents actually speak got given away. Same word, neutral, arriving by two opposite mechanisms: one held by a company, one held by a foundation. The practical read: when you build an agent, sort it into the parts that should be permanent and the parts that should be rentable. The permanent parts are the ones the protocols describe your tool definitions, your agent contracts, the interfaces between components. Everything else, the model, the router, the host, the framework of the month should be something you can swap out on a bad Monday without touching the parts that took you six weeks to get right.
Bet on the protocol, not the provider. One of them can be bought on a Tuesday.
Source: Techzine / Linux Foundation · Monday 24 August 2026