The Agent Network Protocol (ANP) is an agent communication protocol that supports open-network agent discovery and secure collaboration between agents, using W3C decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and JSON-LD graphs.
Usage
A survey of agent interoperability protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP) treats ANP as one of four emerging protocols for interoperability between LLM-powered agents, alongside Model Context Protocol, Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) and Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A). It places ANP at the last stage of the phased adoption roadmap it proposes: after MCP for tool access, ACP for messaging and A2A for collaborative task execution, adoption extends to ANP for decentralized agent marketplaces.
Related Terms
- Model Context Protocol — the first protocol in the survey’s roadmap, for tool access
- Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) — the survey’s protocol for structured, session-aware messaging
- Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) — the survey’s protocol for collaborative task execution