Two months after launching A2A, Google gave it away. On June 23, 2025, the company donated the Agent2Agent protocol to the Linux Foundation, where it now sits under neutral governance with Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow as founding members. The launch got the headlines back in April. This is the move that decides whether A2A is still standing in five years.
What Google announced
At the Open Source Summit, the Linux Foundation formed a new Agent2Agent project and Google transferred the protocol specification, its SDKs, and its developer tooling into it. The reporting is in Google's own post at developers.googleblog.com/en/google-cloud-donates-a2a-to-linux-foundation. Since April, adoption has widened:
More than 100 companies now support the protocol, with AWS and Cisco as its newest validators.
The reason for handing it off is governance. Under the Linux Foundation, A2A becomes vendor-agnostic and community-driven, which means no single company, Google included, can steer it toward its own products. Cisco framed the stakes plainly:
We've always believed in the vision of an open, interoperable Internet of Agents, and we're joining the A2A Project as foundational members because community-driven development is the fastest path to widespread agent-to-agent adoption.
In plain English
A standard controlled by one vendor is a liability, however good it is. If that vendor changes strategy, raises prices, or loses interest, everything built on top inherits the risk. Moving a protocol into a neutral foundation removes the single point of failure. The rules of the road stop being one company's product decision and become shared infrastructure that the whole industry has a stake in keeping alive.
That is why the phrase "Internet of Agents" is worth pausing on. The open web works because nobody owns HTTP. Any browser can talk to any server because the protocol underneath belongs to everyone and no one. A2A under the Linux Foundation is a deliberate bid to give agents that same footing: a common language for discovering each other and coordinating work that outlives whichever company happened to write the first draft.
The announcement also points at what comes next. Google says the group will keep working toward open standards that complement A2A across topics like trustworthy agent identity, delegated agent authority, and agent security and reputation. Read that as a roadmap: today agents can find and talk to each other, and the near-term work is proving who each agent actually is.
Why this matters for your business
The practical takeaway is that you can now build toward A2A without betting on a single vendor's roadmap. A protocol steered by AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Google together, under neutral rules, is about as safe a foundation as this young market offers. Choosing to be legible to agents stopped being a gamble on one platform's future.
The identity thread is the part to watch. When verified agent identity and reputation become part of the standard, the agents your systems trust will be the ones that can prove who they are, and the ones that cannot will be filtered out. That cuts both ways. Your own presence on the agent web will be judged the same way, by whether it can be verified. An unverifiable agent is exactly what the reputation layer now on the roadmap is being built to screen out, so the businesses that can already prove identity will start the next phase ahead rather than scrambling to catch up.
What this means for the sites we build
Standards outlive the vendors that launch them, so we build on the standard, not on any one company's platform. The websites we deliver treat the agent channel as open infrastructure: a published Agent Card in the shared A2A format, reachable by any compliant agent rather than locked to a single ecosystem.
We also build for the identity chapter the foundation is already signaling. The agent cards we publish for clients are cryptographically signed, so that when verification becomes the price of being trusted on the agent web, our clients already pass. Our Apex Domain Agents work is designed around that posture: a domain that any agent can find, and whose agent can prove it is who it claims to be.
If you want your business positioned on the open agent web before verification becomes the entry requirement, let's talk.
Questions this raises
Which companies founded the Agent2Agent project at the Linux Foundation?
The Linux Foundation's Agent2Agent project launched with Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow as founding members, formed at the Open Source Summit North America on June 23, 2025. Google transferred the A2A protocol specification, its SDKs, and its developer tooling into the new, independent entity as part of the donation.
How many companies support the A2A protocol as of the Linux Foundation donation?
More than 100 companies now support the A2A protocol, according to Google's June 2025 announcement, with AWS and Cisco named as its newest validators at the time of the donation. That is up from the roughly 50 technology partners that backed A2A at its April 2025 launch.
Why did Google give A2A away instead of keeping control of it?
Google donated A2A to remove itself as a single point of control, so no one company, including Google, can steer the protocol toward its own products. Under the Linux Foundation, A2A becomes vendor-agnostic and community-governed, which is the structure Cisco pointed to when it said community-driven development is the fastest path to widespread agent-to-agent adoption.
Sources
- Google Cloud donates A2A to Linux Foundation · Google for Developers Blog, June 23, 2025
- Linux Foundation press release announcing the Agent2Agent project
- A2A protocol documentation