Skip to main content

COMPEL Glossary / agent-to-agent-a2a-protocol

Agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol

The communication mechanism between AI agents — specifying message format, authentication, authorization scope, rate limiting, and audit logging.

What this means in practice

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (November 2024) is an open reference implementation; A2A protocols are governance artifacts because they define the attack surface and audit trail for multi-agent coordination.

Synonyms

agent-to-agent communication , A2A protocol , inter-agent protocol

See also

  • Multi-agent system (MAS) — A system composed of multiple interacting AI agents — each with its own goals, memory, tool access, and decision logic — that communicate and coordinate to achieve individual or collective objectives.
  • Tool use / function calling — A prompt pattern authorizing the model to request named functions with structured arguments — searching the web, reading a database, calling a calculator, triggering an API — rather than generating all answers from its weights.
  • Agent observability — The logging, tracing, and evaluation infrastructure that makes an agent's plans, tool calls, memory reads/writes, and decisions auditable after the fact.

Related articles in the Body of Knowledge