Five companies that rarely agree on anything just agreed on one thing: don’t let Anthropic own the plumbing. Per The Information, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow will back a shared technical standard for connecting AI agents to enterprise software — a direct counter to Anthropic and OpenAI.
Why gang up on a protocol?
Over the past 18 months, Anthropic’s MCP quietly became the default way agents plug into tools and data. Everyone shipped MCP servers because customers demanded it. But building your enterprise stack on a rival’s foundation is a terrible long-term position, and these five know it.
A2A is the weapon
The alliance centers on Google’s A2A protocol — now v1.2, governed by the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, with 150 organizations running it in production and cryptographically signed agent cards for domain verification. An open spec with official SDKs, so anyone can wire agents in today.
On paper the two are complementary: MCP connects agents to tools, A2A connects agents to each other across platforms. In practice, this is a land grab. The fight over the enterprise “socket” for AI agents just went public.
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