The State of A2A: What Died and What Survived - AgentNews #36
Agent News #036
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Agent News #036 New: polling webhooks. Inbox events with no public URL → ( https://www.agentmail.to/blog/introducing-polling-webhooks?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Agent News Issue 036 · November 2026 ********************************************* The State of A2A: What Died and What Survived ********************************************* The other day, I stumbled onto a tweet announcing IBM's Agent Communication Protocol. Remember that one? IBM shipped ACP in 2025. I was pleasantly surprised by this. It was probably IBM's attempt to get hip with the new kids in town. A month later, Google announced its own agent protocol, A2A, with 50+ partners lined up behind it. Where are all these protocols now? Nowhere, really. ACP lasted about five months before IBM folded it into A2A and said the team would be winding down development. A2A is still active, kind of, but no one's actually using it. When the Linux Foundation marked A2A's first birthday, they counted supporters and GitHub stars, but not how many agents were actually talking over the thing. ------------------ So, what happened? ------------------ For the most part, it's back to agents and MCP now. My read is that these protocols were more futuristic than what we actually have, which is probably what stalled adoption. They were too complicated and divorced from the actual use cases at the time, and even now. They were written for swarms of agents and 50-agent orchestrations, a world where agents could look up any other agent and just start talking and negotiating. That world was never really on the books at that point, and it still seems a bit distant. What was actually happening at the time was one person running a coding agent, or a personal assistant, or a customer support agent. All of these use cases needed to reach people and services that already existed. A2A did not do discovery well. One of the fundamental flaws was that most of these protocols only helped you reach an agent whose domain you already knew. Then there was Moltbook. Moltbook was a social network built only for agents. Humans could watch but not post. It went viral and grew fast right away, and Meta bought it in March. In our opinion, this may have actually slowed down agent adoption. This was the purest version of the dream: a place built from scratch for agents to talk to agents. The thing is, it ended up being a place where people puppeteered their agents to do what they wanted. After all, we did it ourselves. Moltbook All of these protocols and platforms made the same mistake. They built somewhere new and asked agents to move in. Think of it this way: when the world was first introduced to cars, we didn't build new roads for them. They drove on the same roads that horse-drawn carriages used, and we improved the roads later on. The point is, we needed to onboard agents to the places and services we already work in. -------------- What survived? -------------- MCP is the clear winner. It never asked anyone to join a new network. It put tools inside Claude, Cursor and coding agents, places people already had open all day. MCP let you connect to many things in minutes, while with A2A you had to spend days learning orchestration concepts. But there's an even simpler way, which is email. It sounds biased, but look at the last two months. All these personal agent providers started building email and introduced email services for their agents. Muse Mail and Grok Bot's mail are cases in point. Even Google's Gemini coworker agents got addresses inside Workspace. Google, the company that originally wrote A2A, didn't even mention it in the launch. When Google needed its agents to be reachable, it gave them an inbox. Email already has what the new protocols were trying to invent. Over 4.7 billion people already have an address, and trust is anchored to domains. Once two agents have addresses, they can talk without anyone writing a spec. We've watched two OpenClaw agents build an HTML5 game together on a single email thread. This was one of the earliest signs that email was going to be the primary, and the easiest, way for agents to talk to each other. ---------------------------------------- Don't rent your agent's identity, though ---------------------------------------- This is the dangerous trend, in my opinion. A mail.grokbot.com address belongs to Grok Bot, and an @agents address belongs to Google. Switch assistants or move to a different framework, and these addresses won't move with you. That's a problem. That's the walled garden again. If all the context, the conversations and the audit logs live in your provider's product, you start from zero every time you switch. If you give your agent an address it owns, one that keeps its state and outlives whatever assistant or framework is driving it this year, you're good. That's the whole idea behind AgentMail. The inbox stays the same whether a Muse, a Grok Bot, a dot or a script you wrote last weekend is answering it, and AgentID builds on that address so your agent can sign up for the apps it uses. In my opinion, if you're paying actual money for personal agents or any kind of automation, you shouldn't have to spoon-feed them what to do and how. All these services should work together to give you better output, and that means different agents talking to each other. The other day, my dot caught a discrepancy in my tax filings, but it couldn't take any action or give me next steps, because all of my financial context lives in Claude. If it had a way to email my Claude instance, the two could have worked out a solution together and looped in my accountant all at once. In the end, that's exactly what happened. This is what I mean. Now AgentMail has calendars too, so your agents can do more than trade emails. They can send invites to your friends and coworkers and answer the ones that come back, which means your agents can coordinate across calendars as well as inboxes. Imagine all your AI assistants speaking to each other, working in harmony to give you the best possible input. That's the way we envision work, and all it takes is an address your agent owns. Give your agent an address it owns → ( https://console.agentmail.to/sign-up?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Spotlight AgentMail Polling webhooks are live Push webhooks need an always-on public endpoint, and websockets need a live connection. Agents that run in a sandbox, a serverless function, a cron job or behind a firewall have neither. Polling webhooks let the agent pull its email events off a queue whenever it happens to be running. Built with Svix, in the Python and TypeScript SDKs. Read the announcement → ( https://www.agentmail.to/blog/introducing-polling-webhooks?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) AgentMail Domain Connect, so DNS stops breaking setups 42.1% of recent customers who added a custom domain hit a verification failure, almost always a typo or a doubled domain suffix from copying records by hand. If your domain is on Vercel or Cloudflare, you now approve the records through a signed link instead. Read the announcement → ( https://www.agentmail.to/blog/introducing-domain-connect?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Startup Spotlight Nauta Nauta learns how a company runs from its email, its documents and its business rules, then puts agents on finance, procurement, logistics and sales work. People still review and approve what the agents decide. Worth a look if you work in distribution, manufacturing or global trade. getnauta.com → ( https://www.getnauta.com/?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Good Reads How Granola grew AI-attributed signups 4,600% ( https://discoveredlabs.com/case-studies/granola?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Discovered Labs on the SEO and answer engine work behind it, including a 558% rise in non-branded AI citations. Read the case study → ( https://discoveredlabs.com/case-studies/granola?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Is the agent acting for itself, or on behalf of a user? ( https://www.agentid.com/blog/is-the-agent-acting-for-itself-or-on-behalf-of-a-user?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) How to read that off a verified token, and why getting it wrong bills, revokes or blames the wrong party. Read it on agentid.com → ( https://www.agentid.com/blog/is-the-agent-acting-for-itself-or-on-behalf-of-a-user?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Upcoming Events Nov 7 AIE Code Summit 2026 Hackathon Saturday 7 November · 9:00 to 22:00 PT San Francisco, United States · application required Apply → ( https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/aie-code-2026-hackathon?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Nov 10 AWS x NVIDIA Workshop for Model Customization Tuesday 10 November · 9:30 to 14:00 PT San Francisco, United States Register → ( https://luma.com/xjuponbi?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Nov 17 AI Infrastructure Night Tuesday 17 November · 17:00 to 19:30 PT San Francisco, United States Register → ( https://luma.com/1ihtxydc?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) AgentMail ( https://agentmail.to?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Docs ( https://docs.agentmail.to?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Get Started Free ( https://console.agentmail.to/sign-up?utm_source=agentmail_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agent_news_036 ) Agent News is published by AgentMail. 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- 6 November 2026 · 01:00 UTC
