ACP

What Are the Three Major AI Agent Protocols in 2026? By mid-2026, the AI agent ecosystem has converged around three dominant protocols: MCP (Model Context Protocol) for connecting agents to tools and data sources, A2A (Agent-to-Agent) for enabling autonomous agent collaboration, and ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) for structured message passing between distributed agents. Each solves a fundamentally different problem, and choosing the wrong one is one of the most common mistakes teams make when building agentic systems today. ...

The Two Protocols Trying to Define How AI Agents Buy Things By mid-2026, two competing standards are vying to become the default way AI agents handle commerce: Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and OpenAI/Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). Both solve the same fundamental problem — how does an AI agent discover products, negotiate a purchase, and complete a transaction on behalf of a human — but they approach it from very different angles. ...

The JetBrains ACP Agent Registry is a curated, one-click marketplace for AI coding agents inside IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and other JetBrains IDEs. Launched January 28, 2026, it lets you install Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and 30+ other agents in seconds — no manual JSON editing required. What Is the JetBrains ACP Agent Registry? The JetBrains ACP Agent Registry is the world’s first open, cross-editor AI agent marketplace, jointly built by JetBrains and Zed Industries and launched on January 28, 2026. It solves a problem that frustrated developers for years: every AI coding agent had its own proprietary installation process — download a binary, edit JSON config files, restart the IDE, repeat. The registry replaces that friction with a browser-like “one-click install” for any ACP-compatible agent directly inside IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand, and other JetBrains IDEs running version 2025.3 or later. As of mid-2026, the registry lists 30+ agents including Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenHands, Kimi CLI, Goose, Cline, and Koog (JetBrains’ own Junie agent). The registry is open — any developer or company can submit an ACP-compatible agent for inclusion. Both JetBrains and Zed share the same backend registry, meaning an agent listed there works in both editors without duplication. ...