**Google** announcement of **August 6, 2026**: Google joins as **Core Maintainer** of the **Agent Plugins 1.0.0** specification, an open, *vendor-neutral* packaging format for distributing **Agent Skills** and **MCP servers** together. ⭐ **The governance fact outweighs the technical fact**: the specification was published by a **TSC** whose Core Maintainers come from **Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel** — Google joins them, represented by **Kevin Hou** (Senior Staff Engineer, Google DeepMind). ⚠️ **Anthropic does not appear on this list**, even though the two packaged building blocks (**Agent Skills** and **MCP**) originate from Anthropic: the packaging layer for Anthropic's two formats is being standardized without Anthropic being named among the maintainers. **The diagnosis** is stated in one sentence: *« The core problem isn't the components. It's the manifest. »* A skill is portable, an MCP server is portable; **the box they are put in is not**, and each client had to invent it for itself — hence the forks, the copies of identical components, and their drift. **The format comes down to one constraint**: *« A plugin is a directory. That's the whole idea, and the restraint is the point. »* A `plugin.json` with **two useful lines** (`$schema` + `name`), skills in `skills/` in the Agent Skills specification format, servers declared in `mcp.json` **with an explicit `type` on each entry** (stdio, Streamable HTTP, or legacy HTTP+SSE) — no more transport inferred from the shape of the configuration object. ⭐ **The strength of the design lies in what the manifest cannot do**: it **can neither relocate components nor declare them inline**, so there is no discovery path to configure and no precedence order to learn. Operational corollary: **components fail independently** — an `mcp.json` server that fails to start does not take the plugin's skills down with it; the client skips the entry, continues, and reports the failure. **The accepted escape hatch** is the **reverse-domain** directory (`com.example.client/`), an extension space belonging entirely to one client (hooks, agents, commands) that others ignore: *« the portable core stays small because the non-portable parts have somewhere legitimate to go »*. **A rare section worth commending** — ***« Not Every skill should be a Plugin »*** : a single MCP server to a single client, `mcp.json` is enough; a single skill needs no plugin. The format is only justified for components **that belong together and must travel together**. ⚠️ **What v1 explicitly excludes** — and this is the point to remember before deployment: **no installation mechanism, no distribution protocol, no permissions model, no sandboxing requirement, no trust or provenance verification, no UX** — listed under *future considerations*, not passed over in silence. The whole fits into a **four-layer, independently adoptable stack**: **discover** (Agentic Resource Discovery), **describe** (AI Catalog, which would register the `application/agent-plugins+json` type), **package** (Agent Plugins), **execute** (MCP + Agent Skills). Two Google products already ship: **Agents CLI** (skills for agent building, evaluation, deployment, observability, publishing — usable from Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Claude Code, or Cursor) and **Data Agent Kit** (BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud SQL).
Landing page of the **official specification** of the **Agent Client Protocol (ACP)** (`agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction`), accessed on **August 2, 2026**. This is not a dated article but a **living artifact**: the fiche is dated by its observation, not by a publication date. **One-sentence mission statement**: *"The Agent Client Protocol (ACP) standardizes communication between code editors/IDEs and coding agents and is suitable for both local and remote scenarios."* **The stated problem** fits in three lines: coding agents and editors are **tightly coupled** and *"interoperability isn't the default"* — every editor must build a custom integration per agent, every agent must implement editor-specific APIs. Three named consequences: **integration overhead** (every agent-editor pair requires custom work), **limited compatibility** (an agent only reaches a subset of editors), **developer lock-in** (*"choosing an agent often means accepting their available interfaces"*). **The solution is explicitly modeled on LSP** — *"similar to how the Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardized language server integration"* — with a reciprocal benefit: an agent that speaks ACP works with **any** compatible editor, an editor that supports ACP gains access to the **entire** ACP agent ecosystem. **Two deployment modes, and this is the most underrated point**: **local** agents run as an editor subprocess over **JSON-RPC on stdio**, but **remote** agents are planned over **HTTP or WebSocket** — support stated as *"work in progress"*, with ongoing collaboration with agentic platforms. **Technical lineage with MCP, stronger than mere complementarity**: ACP *"re-uses the JSON representations used in MCP where possible"*, adding types specific to agentic-coding UX needs (**diff** display is the example given); the default format for readable text is **Markdown**, chosen so the editor is not required to render HTML. ⚠️ **Two governance and versioning observations** noted on the page and not in the surrounding discourse: navigation exposes **v1 (Latest)** and **v2 (Draft)** — and **not an "ACP 1.2"** —, and the nav bar links **Zed Industries *and* JetBrains** side by side, alongside an **ACP Registry**, **RFDs**, a **Community** section, **Publications**, **Updates**, and a **Brand** page. Announced official libraries: **Kotlin, Java, Python, Rust, TypeScript**, plus a community track.
#Agent Client Protocol#ACP#open protocol
**Projet Agent Client Protocol** — spécification collective · sans signature individuelle sur cette page. La barre de navigation du site lie deux organisations au même niveau : **Zed Industries** (à l'origine du protocole) et **JetBrains**. La présence d'une section **RFDs** (*requests for discussion*) · d'une page **Community** et d'un **ACP Registry** indique une structure de gouvernance ouverte plutôt qu'une documentation produit.
Tech-watch note by **Didier Girard** dated **August 2, 2026**, prompted by a colleague's question ("what is ACP?") that turns out to address a problem that is not terminological but **documentary**. **Three protocols compete for the acronym**, with no technical overlap whatsoever: **Agent Client Protocol** (client ↔ agent — Zed, August 2025, JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio, Apache-2.0, "what LSP did for languages"), **Agentic Commerce Protocol** (agent ↔ merchant — OpenAI + Stripe, Sept. 29, 2025, facing Google's **UCP** of Jan. 11, 2026 backed by **AP2**), and **Agent Communication Protocol** (agent ↔ agent — IBM Research / BeeAI, marginal but polluting searches). **The core of the note is not the disentangling but its observed failure**: the author searches "ACP" in his tech-watch knowledge base and gets **twelve results, all about the commerce protocol, zero about Zed's** — *"our watch agents had indexed the acronym without disambiguating it"*. Hence a knowledge-engineering rule: ***"never index a bare acronym"*** — the entity is "Agent Client Protocol", "ACP" is **only an alias**, carried by three distinct entities. A structuring clarification follows (**MCP connects an agent to its tools, ACP connects a client to an agent; the two stack**), then the textbook case: **Buzz**, published by **Block** on July 21, 2026 under Apache-2.0 — a self-hostable workspace built on **Nostr**, where every human or agent participant is a **keypair** and every message, workflow step, or git push is a **signed event** in an append-only log. A fully protocol-based architecture (`buzz-acp` an ACP harness over stdio, `buzz-agent` an ACP agent calling an LLM, `buzz-dev-mcp` an MCP server for shell + editing), hence the agent-agnosticism: **Goose, Claude Code, and Codex** plug in through the same harness, and **Hermes** (Nous Research) connected to it without Block writing a single line — *"N+M instead of N×M, running in production"*. The note closes on the question of the **Claude subscription** versus third-party agents, with a five-stage 2026 timeline and a **design rule** that applies beyond this case: the line is not legal but **architectural** — ***"who is consuming, and on whose behalf"*** (an `owner-only` agent consumes your subscription for you; an `anyone` agent in a shared channel routes your colleagues' requests through your account). ⭐ **Verification carried out on this corpus**: the thesis holds, and more starkly than the note asserts — not only is "Agent Client Protocol" **completely absent** from it, but the bare acronym `ACP` **is already typed as an entity** in two fiches, and the KB page `Agentic-Commerce-Protocol` **already attributes the protocol to Google** when it belongs to OpenAI + Stripe. The collision described is not a risk yet to come: it has **already produced an attribution error** in the graph.
**Didier Girard** — auteur de la note. Écrit ici depuis la position de **praticien de la veille outillée** : le déclencheur est une question de collègue · le matériau principal est le comportement observé de sa propre base de connaissances · et la conclusion est une **règle de curation** adoptée en interne. Le texte alterne donc deux voix — l'explicateur de protocoles et l'ingénieur de la connaissance qui constate un défaut chez lui et en tire une norme.