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An IETF Draft Adds Intent Matching Before Agent Discovery Even Starts

A new revision of the AI Agent Discovery and Invocation Protocol (AIDIP), submitted to the IETF by researchers at Tsinghua University and Zhongguancun Laboratory, tries to solve a problem every multi-agent system runs into: before you can discover an agent, you have to already know roughly what you're looking for. The draft defines the usual pieces — a JSON metadata schema covering an agent's capabilities, input/output specs, supported languages, and authentication methods, plus a capability-based discovery mechanism and a unified RESTful invocation interface so a client can call any compliant agent the same way regardless of vendor. That part is familiar territory; several competing drafts (ADP, A2A's Agent Card) cover similar ground. What's new in this revision is an optional layer called Agent Semantic Resolution, described as an extension that lets a client resolve a task intent into one or more candidate agents prior to invoking any specific agent, without changing existing discovery or invocation semantics. In practice: instead of a client filtering a directory by declared capability tags, it can hand the protocol a plain description of what it's trying to accomplish and get back a ranked set of candidates. A slide deck presented at IETF 125 frames this as attribute-filter search plus optional semantic natural-language search through a single search endpoint, layered on top of the existing four-step discover-and-invoke flow. This matters because capability tags are a blunt instrument. An agent that lists 'translation' as a capability tells a client nothing about whether it handles legal documents, real-time audio, or 200-language pairs. Intent-based resolution pushes that matching problem into the protocol layer instead of leaving every orchestrator to write its own heuristic — which is exactly the kind of fragmentation a related IETF draft on AI-agent internet architecture flags as a coordination gap: DNS and well-known-based discovery profiles, capability vocabularies, and discovery metadata models are being built independently across multiple drafts with no single body reconciling them yet. The draft is still an individual submission, not a working group product, and it carries no formal IETF endorsement. But it's a concrete signal that the discovery problem is shifting from 'how do agents advertise themselves' to 'how does a client's stated goal get turned into a shortlist' — a harder and more contested question than metadata formatting.

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An IETF Draft Adds Intent Matching Before Agent Discovery Even Starts
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https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cui-ai-agent-discovery-invocation-01.html 2026-09-12 16:00 UTC
102949 chars · text/html
sha256:950aa713…77596a6d
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-daniel-ai-agent-internet-architecture-00 2026-09-12 16:00 UTC
99286 chars · text/html
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https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/125/materials/slides-125-hotrfc-sessa-ai-agent-discovery-and-invocation-protocol-00 not snapshotted