Agent-to-agent traffic now has its own standards stack, and it looks like email. a2a reached v1.0…
agent-to-agent traffic now has its own standards stack, and it looks like email. a2a reached v1.0 with signed agent cards and grpc, while a september ietf draft borrows smtp's store-and-forward model so agents can ship themselves between runtimes.
the internet is about to get a second type of citizen.
Context
The A2A Protocol community announcement calls v1.0 the first stable, production-ready version, with Signed Agent Cards, multi-tenancy, bindings including JSON plus HTTP, gRPC and JSON-RPC, and a technical steering committee of eight companies. The Agent Transport Protocol Internet-Draft by R. Sharif (draft-sharif-agent-transport-protocol-01) describes an asynchronous store-and-forward messaging protocol modelled on SMTP, with an AX DNS record like MX, dated 26 August 2026 and updated 27 August; the first version is dated 28 March 2026.
A2A v1.0 is a community project's spec and its release date was not found in the text read. The ATP draft is an individual Internet-Draft with intended status Standards Track, not an IETF standard or working group item, and its dated version is August, so a September IETF draft is not supported. A differently named Agent Transfer Protocol draft (draft-li-atp) is a separate document. The draft says it complements MCP and A2A. The own standards stack that looks like email is the author's framing.
Watch next
- A dated A2A release page and any IETF group adoption of ATP.
Sources
- Announcing A2A v1.0a2a-protocol.org
- draft-sharif-agent-transport-protocol-01 (IETF Datatracker)datatracker.ietf.org
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 20 September 2026 at 23:02 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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