# Foundation Protocol: A Coordination Layer for Agentic Society

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23218 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23218/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 4 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 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, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey of AI Agent Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16736/) (2025)
- [Agent Network Protocol Technical White Paper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00007/) (2025)
- [Virtual Agent Economies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10147/) (2025)
- [Some Simple Economics of AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20946/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous agents are moving from tools into a layer of social infrastructure: they browse, purchase, deploy software, manage systems, and increasingly interact with one another. As these systems scale, the bottleneck shifts away from raw model capability toward coordination. Agents need to form reliable relationships, organize multi-agent work, exchange value, support an AI economy, and stay safe and accountable under real-world oversight. This paper introduces the Foundation Protocol (FP), a graph-first coordination layer for an emerging human-AI society. FP unifies heterogeneous entities, including agents, tools, resources, humans, institutions, and organizations, and supports native multi-party organization and event-based collaboration. It also provides economic primitives for metering, receipts, and settlement, and treats policy, provenance, and audit as first-class concerns. FP is designed to wrap and bridge existing protocols rather than replace them, enabling incremental adoption while reducing integration and governance overhead. The aim is to keep autonomous agency composable while keeping accountability non-negotiable, so that coordination itself can become shared infrastructure for a human-AI society that is open, pluralistic, and governable.