How does ACF relate to other Agentic protocols?
The Agent Connect Framework (ACF) is designed to facilitate collaboration between agents, regardless of the agent framework or deployment platform. This framework is part of a larger ecosystem of standards and frameworks that address similar concerns. The ultimate goal of ACF and the IBM watsonx platform is to be inclusive of open standards, open source, and open protocols that have proven value to the developer community and AI-powered ecosystems.
MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to large language models (LLMs). It provides a standardized way for AI models to connect to different data sources and tools, similar to how a USB-C port connects devices to peripherals. ACF does not define how agents connect to data sources or tools, thus being compatible with MCP.
MCP uses a style of JSON-RPC for communication, which is optimized for local services and HTTP with support for server-sent events (SSE), enabling streaming of tool calls and responses. This communication makes MCP highly compatible with ACF, which assumes steps or actions that agents take happen asynchronously, and event messages relay responses and status back to the calling application or agent.
For more information on MCP, see the following resources:
MCP specification
Find the most recent MCP specification here
MCP documentation
Find the main MCP documentation here.
The Agent Protocol, defined by LangChain.ai, is a framework-agnostic API for serving LLM-based agents in production environments. It centers around three key concepts:
This protocol is similar to the Agent API set defined by ACF. Collaboration between the watsonx Orchestrate and the LangChain teams is in progress to ensure cross-compatibility between ACF and Agent Protocol, with the ultimate goal of seamless bi-directional interoperability. Future versions of ACF may adopt an Agent Protocol flavor of the core Agent APIs to enable this compatibility.
For more information on Agent Protocol, see the following resources:
OpenAPI specification
Find the full OpenAPI specification here.
JSON specification
Find the JSON specification here.
AGNTCY is an open-source collective building the infrastructure for the Internet of Agents: an open, interoperable internet for agent-to-agent collaboration. The Agent Connect Protocol within AGNTCY is heavily inspired by the Agent Protocol by LangChain.
For more information on AGNTCY, see the following resources:
AGNTCY Org
Find the AGNTCY website here.
AGNTCY Agent Connect Protocol
Find the protocol specification here.
Google has announced an open protocol called Agent2Agent (A2A), with support and contributions from over 50 technology partners. A2A enables AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms or applications. Similar to ACF, A2A’s goal is to enable AI agents to work across entire enterprise application estates.
A2A addresses the following capabilities:
A2A draft spec
Google has published a draft spec here.