agenticweb.wiki

Agent Protocol AP

By Belgravia Labs Standards Observatory · Last verified · 4 primary sources

Agent Protocol (AP) is an agentic-web standard (endpoint) at step 5, Act, originated as an AI Engineer Foundation community project; its status is "Dormant: no push since 2025-04-08. Common interface for interacting with AI agents". It answers: "How does a client or dev-tool start a task on an autonomous agent, step it, and fetch results, regardless of which framework built the agent?" Implementation status is multi-implementation (project README), last verified 2026-10-29.

Act Agent Protocol is a framework-agnostic, OpenAPI v3 REST specification originally proposed by the AI Engineer Foundation (AIEF) community, alongside the early Auto-GPT/e2b ecosystem, to give any autonomous agent a single, predictable interface: create a task (POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks), execute it step by step (POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks/{task_id}/steps), and list or download artifacts, regardless of the framework the agent was built with [1]. It solves the comparison and integration problem for early agent frameworks — before Agent Protocol, every agent exposed a bespoke interface, making benchmarking and devtool-building across agents difficult; the spec's own stated goal is 'great developer experience' for agent builders wanting to avoid writing boilerplate API code [1].

Overview

It does not define agent-to-agent communication (the README lists this as future roadmap, unrealized), does not define authorization on behalf of end users, and does not define discovery — clients are expected to know an agent's base URL out of band [1].

As of September 2026,, the project's governance and web presence show significant drift from its AIEF origins. The GitHub repository formerly hosted under the AI-Engineer-Foundation organization now redirects to agi-inc/agent-protocol and states it is "Maintained by AGI, Inc.," a commercial entity, rather than the original community foundation [1]. More notably, the repository's own linked documentation domain, agentprotocol.ai, no longer hosts the project's docs at all: as fetched, it serves an unrelated third-party site describing itself as an 'independent, vendor-neutral guide' to MCP, A2A, and Agent Protocol, with no visible connection to AI Engineer Foundation, AGI Inc., or the GitHub repository that links to it as its official documentation [2]. This is flagged as a dispute rather than treated as settled, since it was not possible to determine whether the domain lapsed and was independently re-registered, or was deliberately repurposed by a current stakeholder.

Implementation history shows genuine multi-party adoption during the 2023–2024 Auto-GPT era — Auto-GPT, Auto-GPT-Forge, and smol developer all merged Agent-Protocol-compliant PRs, with e2b and Auto-GPT credited as 'engaged' co-developers of the spec — but no evidence of continued active development or adoption was found in the past year of repository activity [1]. What is unresolved: whether Agent Protocol should be considered a live, maintained standard at all today, or a historically important but now largely dormant spec whose primary surviving artifact is the OpenAPI file in a repository under new, commercial ownership.

Discovery and probe

None published; a client is expected to know an agent's base URL out of band (no well-known path or registry defined by the spec itself)

POST {origin}/ap/v1/agent/tasks
parse:     A 200/201 response returning a Task object containing a task_id field confirms an Agent-Protocol-compliant server per the OpenAPI schema.
on absent: A 404 or schema mismatch means this origin does not implement Agent Protocol. Given the project's docs domain has since been repurposed to unrelated content and no commit activity was found in the past year, absence should now be treated as the default expectation rather than a surprise.

Not probed live: unsafe-post. The probe is POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks, which starts a task.

Instances

project README (lists Auto-GPT, Auto-GPT-Forge, and smol developer as adopters, with e2b and Auto-GPT as 'engaged' in protocol development)

Every instance with its source is listed on the instances page.

Verified SDKs, reference implementations & validators:

See also

Comparisons

References

  1. The GitHub repository formerly at AI-Engineer-Foundation/agent-protocol now redirects to agi-inc/agent-protocol ('Maintained by AGI, Inc.'), MIT licensed, 1.5k stars, 186 forks; its README defines the protocol as an OpenAPI REST spec with POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks and POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks/{task_id}/steps as its two essential routes, and lists Auto-GPT, Auto-GPT-Forge, and smol developer as adopting projects. — https://github.com/agi-inc/agent-protocol (2026-09-06) VERIFIED
  2. The repository's own 'Docs' link, https://agentprotocol.ai/, currently serves an unrelated third-party site ('AgentProtocol.ai') describing itself as 'an independent, vendor-neutral guide' comparing MCP, A2A, and Agent Protocol — it shows no visible affiliation with AI Engineer Foundation, AGI Inc., or the agi-inc/agent-protocol repository, and does not host the project's own documentation. — https://agentprotocol.ai/ (2026-09-06) VERIFIED
  3. js-sdk-v1.0.5 released 2024-04-02 — https://github.com/agi-inc/agent-protocol/releases/tag/js-sdk-v1.0.5 (2024-04-02) VERIFIED
  4. No push since 2025-04-08 (over 180 days) — https://github.com/agi-inc/agent-protocol/releases/tag/js-sdk-v1.0.5 (2024-04-02) REPORTED

Disputed: The repository's own README and GitHub 'About' field link https://agentprotocol.ai/ as the project's documentation home, but as fetched the domain serves unrelated third-party content — a vendor-neutral protocol-comparison guide covering MCP, A2A, and Agent Protocol — with no visible affiliation to AI Engineer Foundation, AGI Inc., or the GitHub repository that links it. The canonical specification currently survives only as the openapi.yml file inside the GitHub repository itself.

Verification log and errata

JSON · Markdown · OKF v0.2

Frequently asked questions

What is Agent Protocol (AP)?
Agent Protocol (AP) is an agentic-web standard (endpoint) at step 5, Act, originated as an AI Engineer Foundation community project; its status is "Dormant: no push since 2025-04-08. Common interface for interacting with AI agents". It answers: "How does a client or dev-tool start a task on an autonomous agent, step it, and fetch results, regardless of which framework built the agent?" Implementation status is multi-implementation (project README), last verified 2026-10-29.
What is the adoption and standardization status of Agent Protocol?
Dormant: no push since 2025-04-08 (repository not archived). "Common interface for interacting with AI agents. The protocol is tech stack agnostic" (repository description); defined as an OpenAPI REST spec with two core routes, POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks and POST /ap/v1/agent/tasks/{task_id}/steps, originated as an AI Engineer Foundation (AIEF) community project (GitHub org formerly AI-Engineer-Foundation); the repository now lives under 'agi-inc' and states it is 'Maintained by AGI, Inc.', a commercial entity; the docs domain linked from the repository, agentprotocol.ai, currently serves unrelated third-party content rather than AIEF/AGI Inc. project documentation. Implementation: multi-implementation — project README (lists Auto-GPT, Auto-GPT-Forge, and smol developer as adopters, with e2b and Auto-GPT as 'engaged' in protocol development). Version: unversioned OpenAPI spec (schemas/openapi.yml). Last verified 2026-10-29.
How does Agent Protocol compare to other act protocols?
Agent Protocol (AP) is one of 13 standards at step 5, Act (Do something for me). It pairs with Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A), Agent Communication Protocol. Head-to-head comparisons on this site: Model Context Protocol. Every standard at this step is listed at https://agenticweb.wiki/category/act/.