IETF forms agentproto working group for AI agent dialogs
The new group will define a baseline protocol and reference architecture so autonomous agents can keep correlated conversations across platforms.
The Internet Engineering Task Force has formed the Agent Communication Protocols (agentproto) working group in the Applications and Real-Time Area to standardize how AI agents manage dialogs with users, other agents, and tools.
An AI agent is an autonomous system that uses models to finish tasks on behalf of a human, another agent, or a calling system. Those interactions create dialogs: correlated sequences of exchanges whose context (identifiers and lifecycle state) must travel with the conversation. The charter deliberately excludes model content such as prompts, retrieved documents, or conversation memory.
agentproto’s job is to produce a common baseline dialog-management protocol and a reference architecture that ties related building blocks together, so agents from different platforms can interoperate. The group is chaired by Orie Steele and Leslie Daigle, with Charles Eckel as the assigned Area Director.
The work sits at the intersection of growing multi-agent deployments and the long-standing IETF focus on protocol interoperability for real-time and application traffic.