Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto) — proposed IETF Working Group charter (charter-ietf-agentproto-00-04)

Abstract

Proposed IETF Working Group charter "Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto)", revision charter-ietf-agentproto-00-04, status "External Review", WG state "Proposed", responsible AD Charles Eckel, listed on the IESG telechat agenda of 2026-10-08. Verbatim from the charter: "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." A dialog is defined as "the correlated sequence of interactions between two or more participants over the course of a task", and dialog context as "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." Verbatim: "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." Deliverables: an Agentic Dialog Management Protocol (Standards Track) defining dialog management primitives (correlation across multiple hops and trust boundaries; establishment, modification, termination and revocation of propagation relationships; recovery and unreachability handling) and transport bindings over existing IETF protocols such as HTTP, QUIC, WebTransport, WebRTC or MoQ; plus a Reference Architecture (Informational) and Use Cases and Requirements (Informational). Verbatim: "The dialog context is defined so that existing application-layer agent communication protocols (e.g., the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol) can carry it using their own mechanisms." Key consideration quoted: "AI agents act as autonomous software entities that may need to be authenticated independently of the users who delegated authority to them." Out of scope: agent implementation details, standardization of agent decision-making or planning semantics, agent behavioral security, human-to-agent UX, and audit data structures. Proposed milestones: adopt an informational use-cases draft by December 2026, an informational architecture draft by February 2027, adopt a proposed-standard dialog management protocol draft by March 2027, and submit it to the IESG as a proposed standard by March 2028.