How Cisco, LangChain, and Galileo aim to contain 'a Cambrian explosion of AI agents'
Around 500 million years ago, the world exploded with complex life. Prior to what is known as the Cambrian era, the planet was populated primarily with simple, microscopic organisms. But during the Cambrian period, creatures with complex body structures emerged.
Scientists who study such things call this the "Cambrian explosion" because it was a period of rapid evolution. Major animal groups emerged, competition and predation for food resources increased, and new ecosystems appeared.
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As you might imagine, the lab rats and grant chasers are still debating why it all happened so "suddenly." In evolutionary terms, "suddenly" is about 20 million years. The consensus is that a bunch of factors came together, including increased oxygen levels, genetic transformations, environmental changes, and a sort of arms race fostered by natural selection.
Why the sudden history lesson in an article that's supposed to be about AI?
The answer can be found in an announcement by a consortium comprised of the AI nerd herds at Outshift by Cisco (the company's R&D and incubation engine), Galileo (which specializes in agent trust and observability), and LangChain (whose raison d'être is agent orchestration).
They believe that, as much as generative AI has been a fast mover, "We're witnessing a Cambrian explosion of AI agents."
This…might not be so good. AI agents are self-directed entities designed to carry out certain tasks. In many cases, those tasks will take them from infrastructure to infrastructure, often needing to pass through the walled gardens that vendors set up to lock in customers and avoid brand dilution.
So how do we deal with this? Obviously, turning off all computers, moving to a yurt, and sitting in a corner rocking back and forth while keening the tune to Frozen's 'Let It Go', is probably not a strategy for successful governance.
But perhaps there is a way. Perhaps we could coordinate agents so they could work together. If only there was a word that described an organization that managed a group of agents, like an agency.
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Nah. Not hip enough. Let's get rid of most of the vowels. What about… wait for it… AGNTCY? I know, you were thinking Skynet. But AGNTCY works, too.
Cisco, LangChain, and Galileo are founding members of an open-source collective that is building critical infrastructure for agents to work together. They contend that while individual agents can handle small tasks, the real power is in groups of agents working together (like groups of humans working together) to accomplish bigger tasks.
An internet of agents
Currently, such interoperability and standardization are lacking. AGNTCY aims to define and specify an open and interoperable "Internet of Agents" to link AI agents that can transcend vendor and organizational boundaries (presumably with the appropriate security protocols in place).
Cisco brings its networking infrastructure expertise to the table. According to Guillaume De Saint Marc, vice president of engineering at Outshift by Cisco, "We're at an inflection point in AI where the next wave of innovation will come from agents working together. Building this infrastructure as open source ensures it will serve the entire ecosystem, not just individual vendors."
The infrastructure for an Internet of Agents isn't in place yet. According to the team, the best possible multi-agent workflow requires finding the right agents for a given job, connecting them into efficient workflows that can function across frameworks and vendors, running them at scale, running them securely, monitoring performance, and improving and tweaking over time.
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The AGNTCY approach tries to avoid silos that can limit effectiveness. The purpose of the AGNTCY collective is to create open specifications and reference architectures built using open-source technologies to tackle "the end-to-end requirements for sourcing, creating, scaling, and optimizing agentic workflows from a single app to thousands."
Harrison Chase, CEO of LangChain, describes AGNTCY in this way: "Multi-agent systems are the future of AI, but we need open standards for both collaboration and rigorous assessment. The AGNTCY creates the foundation for a truly observable and trustworthy AI ecosystem…to ensure agents perform reliably across diverse scenarios, empowering organizations to deploy at scale."
Architecturally, the group envisions something like this:
Some early specs
AGNTCY is starting its work in three main areas. Interestingly, the group is publishing its specs for each of these elements on GitHub for you to review and provide feedback.
- Agent directory: This is pretty cool. It is essentially an app store for agents. You'll be able to search for agents based on specific capabilities and explore reputation and quality metrics. Here's a link to its spec for when the code
drops at the end of March on GitHub. - Open agent schema framework: This metadata format describes agent capabilities. The directory and other discovery tools can gather and present available options by standardizing this into a readable format. Here's a link to its spec on GitHub.
- Agent Connect protocol and SDK: This is the interop component of the Internet of Agents. It allows agents from different vendors to exchange messages, share content and context, and manage state. It's basically micro-services for AI agents.
When I read this, I was thinking of the plugin directory for WordPress. One of the primary reasons open-source WordPress has become so ubiquitous on the web is that individual websites can be built using the WordPress framework and then selected from thousands of plugins that perform individual jobs.
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More than anything else, it looks like AGNTCY is trying to turn the world of AI agents into one of frameworks and plugins. That makes a ton of sense. It could make this whole thing much more manageable than the chaos of a world of unrestricted AI agents running wild.
Invitation to participate
The AGNTCY founding team has asked for your help. You can participate by visiting agntcy.org or jump into the GitHub repos and look around.
What do you think about AGNTCY's vision for an internet of agents? Do you see AI agents working together as the next big step in artificial intelligence, or do you think the risks outweigh the benefits?
Have you explored any of the open-source specs they've released? How do you feel about the idea of a standardized agent directory, or do you think a decentralized approach would be better? Let us know in the comments below.
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