Adopt
The leading standard for inter-agent communication, now at v0.3 with gRPC support and 150+ organizations backing it through the Linux Foundation.
Why It Matters
A2A solves the fundamental problem of how agents built by different vendors talk to each other. Agent Cards served at /.well-known/agent.json provide elegant, decentralized discovery — no central registry needed. With v0.3 adding gRPC alongside HTTP+SSE, it now covers both request/response and high-throughput streaming use cases.
Strengths
- Agent Cards make discovery simple and decentralized — just publish a JSON file
- Linux Foundation governance with 150+ member organizations ensures longevity
- Google-originated but genuinely open — broad industry buy-in from AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others
- v0.3 gRPC support opens the door to low-latency, high-volume agent interactions
- Clear task lifecycle model (submitted, working, completed, failed) maps well to real workflows
Limitations
- Still evolving rapidly — expect breaking changes between minor versions
- Agent Card schema could use richer capability descriptions beyond natural language
- Security model (authentication, authorization between agents) is underspecified
- gRPC support is new and reference implementations lag behind the HTTP path
Risks
- "150+ organizations" backing it sounds great, but many are logo-only participants with no shipping implementations
- Decentralized discovery via
.well-known/agent.jsonis elegant but means no central authority validates agent identity or trustworthiness - The security model gap is not minor — inter-agent communication without proper auth is an attack surface waiting to be exploited
- Google's heavy involvement raises questions about whether this is truly neutral or strategically positioned against MCP