A second connection standard appears. What happens when standards compete
Google announced Agent2Agent at Cloud Next this week, two weeks after OpenAI adopted Anthropic’s protocol. They solve different problems — mostly.
At Cloud Next on 9 April 2025, Google announced the Agent2Agent protocol, an open specification letting independent AI agents discover each other and work together, backed at launch by a large group of technology partners.
Two weeks ago this blog noted that OpenAI had adopted Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, calling the integration problem effectively settled. A second standard appearing immediately afterwards deserves a correction and an explanation.
They are not the same layer
The connection protocol from November answers: how does an AI system reach your documents, your ERP, your data? One model, many tools.
This week’s protocol answers a different question: how do two independent agents, built by different companies, talk to each other? Many agents, one conversation.
In principle these are complementary. In practice the boundary is blurry, both are young, and the industry has a long record of turning complementary standards into competing ones.
Why an SME should not care yet
Agent-to-agent communication assumes you have agents, plural, from different vendors, that need to coordinate. Almost no SME is there, and the ones that are have bigger questions to answer first.
The honest position in April 2025: this is infrastructure for a future that may or may not arrive in the shape currently being advertised.
What is worth taking from it
One thing, and it is not technical. The industry is standardising the plumbing rather than competing on it. Both protocols are open, both have multi-vendor backing, and both were published rather than kept proprietary.
That is the behaviour of a market that expects to compete on applications, not on lock-in. For a buyer it is a good sign, and it strengthens the question from February: can we change the model, and the connection, without rebuilding?
Keep asking that. Ignore the acronyms until a vendor tells you a specific thing you want is blocked because the standards do not match. On current evidence that conversation is a year or two away, and you will have plenty of warning.