Cisco's Agntcy project is the latest AI framework to find refuge at the Linux Foundation.

Developed by Cisco in collaboration with LangChain and Galileo, the Agntcy project bills itself as the "internet of agents" as it’s designed to facilitate discovery and identification of the software bots, messaging among them, and observability of their actions.

Agntcy provides missing pieces needed to build, debug, and secure multi-agent systems

The idea here is that developers will need secure tools to connect agents from different vendors, regardless of what frameworks, tool calling paradigms, or communications protocols the software uses.

"Building the foundational infrastructure for the internet of agents requires community ownership, not vendor control," Vijoy Pandey, SVP of Cisco's Outshift division said in a canned [1]statement . "The Linux Foundation ensures this critical infrastructure remains neutral and accessible to everyone building multi-agent systems."

If all that sounds familiar, that's because Agntcy is far from the first agentic framework or protocol the Linux Foundation has taken on.

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Last month, Google [3]donated its Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol to the foundation. A2A aims to provide a common language AI agents use to discover and delegate tasks to one another.

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IBM has also [6]contributed a number of open source projects to the Linux Foundation, including its own agent-to-agent platform called BeeAI.

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) is not a Linux Foundation project but has become incredibly popular as a method for connecting AI systems to data sources, APIs, and tools.

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As we've previously [11]explored , A2A and MCP are only two pieces of a much bigger agentic AI puzzle. Agntcy aims to fill in the missing pieces needed to build, debug, and secure multi-agent systems.

For example, if you wanted to connect an agent that's based on A2A with another using the Agent Connect Protocol (ACP) you'd need to write a wrapper to translate A2A to ACP or vice versa.

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In this scenario, Agntcy's collection of protocols and software frameworks mans it can act as a universal translator to let the two agents exchange information. The framework also provides avenues for communications over the secure low-latency interactive messaging (SLIM) protocol.

Like A2A and MCP, Agntcy has gained considerable support from more than 60 companies. Five of them – Cisco, Dell, Google, Oracle, and Red Hat – have committed to further development of the project under the Linux Foundation's governance. ®

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[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-welcomes-the-agntcy-project-to-standardize-open-multi-agent-system-infrastructure-and-break-down-ai-agent-silos

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aIntOxJz1rJYjRB6z8ObCAAAAAg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-cloud-donates-a2a-to-linux-foundation/

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[6] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/ai-workflows-get-new-open-source-tools-to-advance-document-intelligence-data-quality-and-decentralized-ai-with-ibms-contribution-of-3-projects-to-linux-fou-1745937200621

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/huawei_rackscale_boogeyman/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/microsoft_boffins_jobs_impacted_ai/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/us_government_identified_ai_use/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/coders_are_using_ai_tools/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/ai_agent_protocols_mcp_a2a/

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[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/