The agent plumbing is standardising faster than the permissions
· re: Google's A2A protocol gets a new home (Axios)
Google’s A2A protocol has moved under the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, joining Anthropic’s MCP under one neutral roof. MCP standardises how an agent talks to tools; A2A standardises how agents talk to each other. The foundation has gone from 49 to more than 250 members in under a year, with AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI all signed on.
My read: this is good news with a gap in the middle. Standardised plumbing is how agents stop being demos and start being infrastructure (nobody builds on connectors that break with every vendor release). But every improvement in how agents connect multiplies what a single agent can reach. The protocols carry authentication, apparently quite well. What they do not carry is the answer to the question that matters: what is the agent on the other end actually cleared to see? That stays the deployer’s problem, and it gets harder, not easier, once any agent can discover and call any other.
I made the identity half of this argument last week, when per-agent identity became a vendor default. This is the other half: once the identity exists and the pipes are standard, the whole game is the policy decision at the data. The plumbing now has a foundation behind it. The permissions are still whatever each deployment cooked up.