WG Review: Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto)

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

A new IETF WG has been proposed in the Applications and Real-Time Area. The
IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was
submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your
comments to the IESG mailing list ([e-mail]) by 2026-09-27.

Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto)
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Current status: Proposed WG

Chairs:
  Orie Steele <[e-mail]>
  Leslie Daigle <[e-mail]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Charles Eckel <[e-mail]>

Applications and Real-Time Area Directors:
  Andy Newton <[e-mail]>
  Charles Eckel <[e-mail]>

Mailing list:
  Address: [e-mail]
  To subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/agentproto
  Archive: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/agentproto

Group page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/agentproto/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-agentproto/

# Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto) Proposed Charter

An AI agent is an autonomous, adaptive software system that uses AI models to
complete a specific task on behalf of a human user, another AI agent, or an
invoking system. AI agents interact with users and other agents through
multiple modalities, including voice, video, and text, and are capable of
independent decision-making, tool invocation, and task completion.

User-to-agent, agent-to-agent, and agent-to-tool interactions create dialogs
between the users, agents, and tools. For all the interactions, there are
common protocol requirements to ensure the correlation and maintenance of the
created dialogs and the propagation of dialog context between the
participants. The dialog context consists of the identifiers and lifecycle
state needed to correlate and maintain an agentic dialog. It does not include
the content exchanged with AI models, such as conversation memory, retrieved
documents, or prompts.

The scope of Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto) Working Group is to
define a common baseline agentic dialog management protocol and build a
reference architecture to integrate related protocol building blocks,
enabling interoperability across platforms and vendors.

The agentic dialog management protocol neither replaces application-layer
agent communication protocols nor defines a new transport protocol. It
defines dialog identifiers, lifecycle semantics, and the propagation of
dialog context, together with bindings specifying how that context is carried
over existing IETF protocols. A dialog context is defined independently of an
application design: an application participant that understands it can
correlate and maintain a dialog without the protocol constraining how the
application is structured or what content it exchanges.

# Key Considerations

There are several considerations that are unique to AI agent applications
that need to be addressed while working on developing the building blocks:

- AI agents act as autonomous software entities that may need to be
authenticated independently of the users they represent. Establishing
verifiable agent identity that is distinct from user identity enables
independent revocation of agent access, scoping of agent permissions to a
subset of user permissions, and auditability of agent-initiated actions
distinct from user-initiated actions.

- Dialog between AI agents and users, other AI agents, and tools can be
long-lived; and they depend on critical dialog context across various
modalities (text, audio, video).  Some agentic dialogs, such as those
involving interactive voice, require very low latency, including support for
fast barge-in (a voice technology feature that allows a user to immediately
interrupt an AI voice agent or automated system while it is talking, causing
the system to stop playback instantly) and smooth interruption handling.
Dialog context may need to be propagated and remain coherent across multiple
intermediaries, and trust boundaries over time. This introduces new
considerations around dialog correlation, reliability, transport session
management, and data transport.

- To protect data exchanged between AI agents and users, other AI agents, and
tools over potentially untrusted networks, particularly when handling
sensitive information (such as personal data within dialog context),
mechanisms are required to establish and verify identity of agents and of the
users on whose behalf they act, ensure confidentiality, integrity,
authenticity of the exchanged data, and delegated authorization across AI
agent chains. This introduces new considerations around protocol-level
security and privacy mechanisms.

# Deliverables

The working group will produce the following standards-track and
informational documents. The work on these deliverables is expected to
proceed in parallel.

## Agentic Dialog Management Protocol (Standards Track)

A Standards Track protocol for the propagation of dialog context across
*multiple* intermediaries, trust boundaries, and transformation of
modalities, enabling interoperable *agentic dialogs*. This protocol serves as
a foundation for dialog continuity and correlation in user-to-agent,
agent-to-agent, and agent-to-tool interactions, enabling dialog continuity
when a participant changes device or network attachment, or when a dialog
resumes after an interruption.

The specification will define:

* Dialog management primitives to:

    - Correlate dialogs, enabling agents to associate related interactions
    across multiple hops, trust boundaries, and over time. - Manage full
    dialog lifecycle, including establishment, modification, termination, and
    revocation of propagation relationships. - Provide scalable and resilient
    operation with recovery from failures of network paths and
    intermediaries, and handle unreachability.

* Transport bindings: specifying how the dialog context with its associated
metadata are carried over one or more existing IETF protocols, such as HTTP,
QUIC, WebTransport, WebRTC or MOQ, based on the anticipated use cases.

The agentic dialog management protocol may be bound to more than one
underlying IETF protocol. The working group will describe a set of evaluation
criteria used to select which bindings to specify.

Because dialog identifiers may persist across intermediaries and trust
boundaries, the working group will analyze the privacy implications of dialog
correlation and specify mitigations.

The protocol will define extension points through which existing
application-layer agent communication protocols (e.g., MCP and A2A) can make
use of it. Changes to those protocols themselves are the responsibility of
their respective maintainers and are, thus, out of scope of agentproto.

## Reference Architecture (Informational)

To ensure interoperability in agent communications, this informational
document describes related protocol building blocks that the agentic dialog
management protocol can reuse, including identity, authentication,
authorization, and encryption, rather than defining new ones. This reference
architecture will:

* Define the terms used by the protocol deliverable.
* Describe the functional blocks the protocol deliverable assumes, and their
relationships.

## Use Cases and Requirements (Informational)
* Describe basic use cases and requirements that drive the protocol
deliverable. The deliverable will also describe the deployment model(s).

# Coordination

This working group is expected to closely coordinate with other related IETF
working groups on dependencies of the reference architecture and the agentic
dialog management protocol, including security, transport, and discovery
aspects:

* **Security:** Web Authorization Protocol (OAuth), webbotauth, WIMSE - on
identity, authorization, and security considerations. * **Transport:**
WebTransport, MoQ, QUIC, TSVWG, httpbis - on data transport. * **Discovery
and Operations:** INT area, OPS area - on agent discovery and operational
considerations. * **Evidence and transparency:** SCITT, RATS, on software and
hardware security. * **Conversational data:** vCon - on conversation
representation and its relationship to dialog context.

If the agentproto working group needs any changes to or extensions of
protocols specified by other active working groups, these needs will be
raised with the relevant working groups for decisions on how best to handle
them, which may include the work being carried out in that working group or,
with its agreement, in agentproto working group.

The working group will also coordinate with and actively seek review of its
deliverables from relevant standardization and open source efforts outside
the IETF to understand deployed practices and avoid unnecessary divergence.

# Out of Scope

The following topics are explicitly out of scope for this working group:

- Implementation details of AI agents, including definition of AI models,
backend AI infrastructure network and protocols, agent reasoning algorithms,
or tool-specific business logic.

- Standardization of agent behavior, decision-making, or planning semantics.

- AI agent behavioral security (e.g., preventing the AI model itself from
hallucinating, though mitigating the impact of hallucinations via
protocol-level user confirmation is in scope).

- The design of human to agent user interfaces, client application UX, or the
rendering of agent outputs on end-user devices

Milestones:

  Dec 2026 - Adopt an informational use cases draft

  Feb 2027 - Adopt an informational architecture draft

  Mar 2027 - Adopt a proposed standard agentic dialog management protocol
  draft

  Mar 2028 - Submit agentic dialog management protocol draft to IESG as a
  proposed standard