The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) is an agent communication protocol that defines general-purpose communication over RESTful HTTP, supporting MIME-typed multipart messages and both synchronous and asynchronous interactions. A survey of agent interoperability protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP) describes its design as lightweight and runtime-independent, which it says enables scalable agent invocation, and lists session management, message routing, and integration with role-based and decentralized identifiers (DIDs) among its features.
Usage
That survey treats ACP as one of four emerging protocols for interoperability between LLM-powered agents, alongside Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) and Agent Network Protocol (ANP). In the phased adoption roadmap the survey proposes, ACP follows MCP: after MCP is adopted for tool access, ACP is introduced for structured, multimodal, session-aware messaging, and the survey also associates this stage with both online and offline agent discovery across scalable, HTTP-based deployments.
Related Terms
- Model Context Protocol — the protocol the survey’s roadmap adopts first, for tool access
- Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) — the protocol the roadmap adds for collaborative task execution
- Agent Network Protocol (ANP) — the protocol the roadmap extends to for decentralized agent marketplaces