By: Kate Blair, Director of Incubation, IBM Research & Todd Segal, Principal Software Engineer, Google
IBM Research launched the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) in March 2025 to power its BeeAI Platform, an open-source platform exploring agent interpretability. Later that month, the BeeAI project—and with it, ACP—was donated to the Linux Foundation, solidifying our commitment to openly advancing agent interoperability as a community.
When the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) came on the scene a month later, we immediately saw alignment in how our teams approached the challenge of enabling agents to communicate and began exploring how to bring the efforts together.
Today, we’re excited to share that ACP is officially merging with the A2A under the Linux Foundation (@thelinuxfoundation) umbrella. This move is all about accelerating progress. “By bringing the assets and expertise behind ACP into A2A, we can build a single, more powerful standard for how AI agents communicate and collaborate,” says Kate Blair (@geneknit), Director of Incubation for IBM Research who has overseen ACP’s development.
As part of this transition, the ACP team will be winding down active development and will begin contributing its technology and expertise directly to A2A. Migration paths and documentation will be provided to help ACP users seamlessly move to A2A.
Blair will join the A2A Technical Steering Committee on behalf of IBM, alongside representatives from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cisco, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP.
For BeeAI users:
- Agents built with the BeeAI framework can be made A2A-compliant by using the A2AServer adapter.
- External A2A agents can be integrated into BeeAI applications using A2AAgent, enabling interaction with agents hosted elsewhere, regardless of how they were built.
- The BeeAI platform, previously powered by ACP, now uses A2A to support agents from any framework.
“We’re thrilled about what’s ahead and look forward to building the future of agent communication together,” says Todd Segal (@ToddSegal), A2A TSC member for Google and who co-led the initial development of the protocol.
The first issues aimed at bringing ACP features into ACP are already in the A2A github. Documentation updates are on the way for BeeAI, and users can get started with the new A2A-powered experience with the migration guide: BeeAI: ACP to A2A Migration Guide.
