OpenAgents

Editorial note

The most credible of the vendor-neutral attempts. Reads like it was written by people who'd built one of these before.

Our analysis

OpenAgents is the most architecturally serious of the vendor-neutral proposals in this layer. The capability manifest format predates A2A by a quarter, the streaming model is more explicit, and the working group is hosted under an independent foundation. The shortcoming is the same one all neutral standards face in this category: without a sponsor with enough adoption to force interoperation testing, the spec is improving in private while the de facto layer settles on whatever the largest vendor ships. The working group's response — a conformance test suite released in Q1 2026 — is the right move, but conformance test suites do not write themselves into client libraries. We expect OpenAgents to remain the reference architecture that more pragmatic protocols quietly adopt rather than the standard that ships.

What we are watching

• Conformance suite adoption by 3+ independent runtimes
• Whether A2A's capability manifest converges toward OpenAgents' format
• Foundation funding: the working group is volunteer-led

How to cite this entry

Citation format: The Agentic Review. "OpenAgents — OpenAgents Protocol." Standards Tracker, last updated 2026-03-28. https://agentic.review/standards/openagents/. See our citation style for additional guidance.

Update history

Material updates to this entry are dated and logged in our corrections log. The version above reflects the most recent review by the standards desk.