# Agent Network Protocol Technical White Paper

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00007 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00007/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 5 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Scalable Communication Protocol for Networks of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11905/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02547/) (2025)
- [Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08224/) (2026)
- [The Attack and Defense Landscape of Agentic AI: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11088/) (2026)
- [Magentic Marketplace: An Open-Source Environment for Studying Agentic Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25779/) (2025)
- [AI Agents with Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02841/) (2025)
- [Security Threat Modeling for Emerging AI-Agent Protocols: A Comparative Analysis of MCP, A2A, Agora, and ANP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11327/) (2026)
- [Agentic Services Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24380/) (2025)
- [Toward a Safe Internet of Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00520/) (2025)
- [AWCP: A Workspace Delegation Protocol for Deep-Engagement Collaboration across Remote Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20493/) (2026)
- [Synergy: A Next-Generation General-Purpose Agent for Open Agentic Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28428/) (2026)
- [GRAIL: A Deep-Granularity Hybrid Resonance Framework for Real-Time Agent Discovery via SLM-Enhanced Indexing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02489/) (2026)
- [Attacks and Mitigations for Distributed Governance of Agentic AI under Byzantine Adversaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12364/) (2026)
- [The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12835/) (2026)
- [Internet 3.0: Architecture for a Web-of-Agents with it's Algorithm for Ranking Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04979/) (2025)
- [A Technical Taxonomy of LLM Agent Communication Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19135/) (2026)
- [Blockchain Empowered Trustworthy Agent Networks: Foundations, Taxonomy, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04626/) (2026)
- [The Natural Language Interaction Protocol and Standard for AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04135/) (2026)
- [STEM Agent: A Self-Adapting, Tool-Enabled, Extensible Architecture for Multi-Protocol AI Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22359/) (2026)
- [Foundation Protocol: A Coordination Layer for Agentic Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23218/) (2026)
- [Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19795/) (2026)
- [AONA: A Comprehensive Architecture and Workflow Design for Global Agentic Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20573/) (2026)
- [InterSAGE: The Secure and Verifiable Interoperability Protocol for An Internet of Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13030/) (2026)
- [A Scalable Trust Discovery Architecture for the Internet of Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20095/) (2026)
- [AgentKernel: The Trust-Native Agentic Operating System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29647/) (2026)
- [Agent-Canary-Mas: End-to-End Evaluation of Protocol Risk in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15529/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the development of large models and autonomous decision-making AI, agents are rapidly becoming the new entities of the internet, following mobile apps. However, existing internet infrastructure is primarily designed for human interaction, creating data silos, unfriendly interfaces, and high collaboration costs among agents, making it difficult to support the needs for large-scale agent interconnection and collaboration. The internet is undergoing a profound transformation, showing four core trends: agents replacing traditional software, universal agent interconnection, native protocol-based connections, and autonomous agent organization and collaboration. To align with these trends, Agent Network Protocol (ANP) proposes a new generation of communication protocols for the Agentic Web. ANP adheres to AI-native design, maintains compatibility with existing internet protocols, adopts a modular composable architecture, follows minimalist yet extensible principles, and enables rapid deployment based on existing infrastructure. Through a three-layer protocol system--identity and encrypted communication layer, meta-protocol negotiation layer, and application protocol layer--ANP. systematically solves the problems of agent identity authentication, dynamic negotiation, and capability discovery interoperability.