ARP: Agent Relations Protocol

Every company now has AI agents — handling support, processing orders, managing workflows. The bots replaced the humans. But the humans on the other side of those interactions? They still have nothing. No agent of their own. No way to negotiate, delegate, or coordinate on equal footing.

ARP changes that. It's an open protocol that gives any AI agent an address, an identity, and the ability to talk to any other agent — across organizations, frameworks, and providers. No platform lock-in. No central registry. No gatekeeper.

Get started

npx create-arp-agent my-agent
cd my-agent && npm install && npm start

Your agent is running. Full quickstart guide.

What it does

• agent@domain addressing — like email, but for machines. Globally unique, DNS-routed, no signup required.
• DID-based identity — cryptographic keys tied to your domain. Portable, verifiable, survives server changes.
• Typed messaging over HTTP — structured JSON messages with a shared vocabulary (Request, Respond, Delegate, Cancel). Works through every firewall.
• Capability discovery — agents describe what they can do in machine-readable Agent Cards. Other agents find them via DNS and negotiate at runtime.
• Deny by default — no anonymous messages, no unsigned payloads. Authentication is mandatory. Trust is earned through verifiable completion records, not declared.

Docs

• Quickstart — deploy your first agent in 5 minutes
• AI Integration — connect Claude, OpenAI, or any LLM to an ARP agent
• Protocol Specification — the full RFC draft
• Research Foundations — protocol analysis of SMTP, ActivityPub, AT Protocol, MCP, HTTP, and DNS that informed the design

Tools

Tool	What it does
arp-sdk	TypeScript SDK. Build agents with one class — handles all protocol plumbing
create-arp-agent	CLI scaffolding. npx create-arp-agent generates a ready-to-deploy project
arp-verify	Endpoint verification. 12-check compliance test for any live ARP agent

Reference implementations

Minimal servers for learning and testing. Each implements the full protocol.

Language	Repo	Quick start
TypeScript	arp-server-ts	npm install && npm start
Python	arp-server-py	pip install -r requirements.txt && python server.py
Cloudflare Workers	arp-server-cf	npm install && npm run dev

Status

Draft v0.4 — feedback welcome. Reference implementations and tools track the spec.

Author

Tiago Pita

License

Apache 2.0