By Rob Barton,
Publication Date: 2026-01-29 21:20:00
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) have gained a significant industry attention over the past year. MCP first grabbed the world’s attention in dramatic fashion when it was published by Anthropic in November 2024, garnering tens of thousands of stars on GitHub within the first month. Organizations quickly saw the value of MCP as a way to abstract APIs into natural language, allowing LLMs to easily interpret and use them as tools. In April 2025, Google introduced A2A, providing a new protocol that allows agents to discover each other’s capabilities, enabling the rapid growth and scaling of agentic systems.
Both protocols are aligned with the Linux Foundation and are designed for agentic systems, but their adoption curves have differed significantly. MCP has seen rapid adoption, while A2A’s progress has been more of a slow burn. This has led to industry commentary suggesting that A2A is quietly fading into the background, with many people believing…
