# MPAC: A Multi-Principal Agent Coordination Protocol for Interoperable Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09744/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 2 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [A survey of agent interoperability protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02279/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ATM: CID-Brokered Pre-Write Admission for Multi-Agent Code Co-Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00041/) (2026)
- [Fault-Tolerant Budget Conservation in Distributed Multi-Agent Delegation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00349/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The AI agent ecosystem has converged on two protocols: the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tool invocation and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) for single-principal task delegation. Both assume a single controlling principal, meaning one person or organization that owns every agent. When independent principals' agents must coordinate over shared state, such as engineers' coding agents editing the same repository, family members planning a shared trip, or agents from different organizations negotiating a joint decision, neither protocol applies, and coordination collapses to ad-hoc chat, manual merging, or silent overwrites. We present MPAC (Multi-Principal Agent Coordination Protocol), an application-layer protocol that fills this gap with explicit coordination semantics across five layers: Session, Intent, Operation, Conflict, and Governance. MPAC makes intent declaration a precondition for action, represents conflicts as first-class structured objects, and supports human-in-the-loop arbitration through a pluggable governance layer. The specification defines 21 message types, three state machines with normative transition tables, Lamport-clock causal watermarking, two execution models, three security profiles, and optimistic concurrency control on shared state. We release two interoperable reference implementations in Python and TypeScript with 223 tests, a JSON Schema suite, and seven live multi-agent demos. A controlled three-agent code review benchmark shows a 95 percent reduction in coordination overhead and a 4.8 times wall-clock speedup versus a serialized human-mediated baseline, with per-agent decision time preserved. The speedup comes from eliminating coordination waits, not compressing model calls. Specification, implementations, and demos are open source.