Google hands A2A protocol to Linux Foundation's AAIF

What happened: Google transferred its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the Linux Foundation body for open agent infrastructure. AAIF announced the move on 20 August; A2A's own blog confirmed on 27 August that it had been accepted as a Growth Stage project.

The numbers: A2A launched in 2025 and is backed by more than 150 organisations. AAIF has grown from fewer than 40 members at its December 2025 launch to more than 250 now, including AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

The details: A2A lets AI agents from different vendors find each other, communicate and hand off tasks. It now sits inside AAIF alongside Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), plus goose and AGENTS.md. MCP connects an agent to tools and data; A2A lets agents work with each other as peers.

Why it matters: Shared standards cut the integration work needed to link agents from different vendors. That makes multi-vendor agent systems practical, rather than locking companies into a single provider.

The context: AAIF runs on a Governing Board, which handles strategy, budget and membership, and a Technical Committee, which oversees projects and reviews. The Linux Foundation supplies legal and operational structure rather than technical direction. Google has compared the approach to Android: open standards paired with an ecosystem to speed adoption.

In their words: Mazin Gilbert, AAIF's executive director, said no single company will build every agent an enterprise needs.

What's next: With A2A and MCP now under the same neutral body, enterprises get one foundation to look to for the connective tissue between agents, tools and data, rather than competing standards from rival vendors.

A2A Protocol's announcement has more on the transfer; Techzine covered Google's rationale.