Awesome Agent Protocols

A curated list of protocols and standards for AI agents.

🔌 wire protocol · 📐 spec / standard · 📄 format / convention · ⚠️ deprecated or merged

Contents

• Foundations
• Tool and context
• Agent to agent
• Agent to UI
• Agent to editor
• Serving and runtime
• Identity and discovery
• Agentic web
• Payments and commerce
• Formats and conventions
• Governance
• Surveys
• Examples

Foundations

The editor-tooling protocols that predate agents. Same idea — decouple client from provider over JSON-RPC, collapse M×N to M+N.

• Language Server Protocol (LSP) 🔌 - JSON-RPC standard for editor↔language-intelligence communication. The original M+N protocol; everything below copies this pattern. protocol
• Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) 🔌 - JSON-RPC for editor↔debugger, through an intermediary adapter. protocol
• Build Server Protocol (BSP) 🔌 - Scala Center / JetBrains JSON-RPC for IDE↔build-tool (targets, compile, test, run). protocol

Tool and context

How an agent calls tools, reads data, and gets context.

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) 🔌 - Anthropic. JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio or Streamable HTTP. Connects LLM hosts to tools, resources, and prompts. Now under the Linux Foundation. 2026-07-28 revision goes stateless with no initialize handshake. protocol
  • Tools 🔌 - tools/list + tools/call. JSON-Schema-typed callable functions. protocol
  • Resources 🔌 - URI-addressed readable context (files, rows, blobs) with subscriptions. protocol
  • Prompts 🔌 - Server-defined parameterized prompt templates, surfaced as slash commands. protocol
  • Sampling 🔌 - Server asks the client for an LLM completion. Supports tool use + toolChoice. Deprecated in 2026-07-28. protocol
  • Elicitation 🔌 - Server pauses to ask the user for input (forms) or hand off to the browser (OAuth, payments). protocol
  • Roots 🔌 - Client declares which file:// paths servers may touch. Deprecated in 2026-07-28. protocol