Approaching Artificial Intelligence Internet Standards
In the rapidly evolving world of technology, a significant development is taking shape – the NANDA (Networked AI Agents in a Decentralized Architecture) protocol. This comprehensive framework, recently introduced, aims to enable global discovery, cryptographically verifiable capability attestation, and cross-protocol interoperability for autonomous AI agents.
The NANDA protocol is designed to address critical gaps in infrastructure for large-scale autonomous AI agent ecosystems, with the ultimate goal of enterprise and consumer deployment. It builds a secure, scalable, and trustworthy multi-agent collaboration environment, applying Zero Trust Agentic Access principles to prevent spoofing, impersonation, and sensitive data leaks. The framework also supports enterprise governance via Agent Visibility and Control mechanisms while maintaining operational autonomy and compliance.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is one of the key partners driving this framework's advancement. As part of a multi-institution collaboration that includes Cisco, MIT, CMU, and Distributedapps.AI, TCS's participation, with key contributors like Rekha Singhal, highlights its role in enterprise adoption and development of the NANDA framework. Mitsubishi Electric is also a partner engaged in this initiative, supporting the expansion of networked AI agents and decentralized AI architectures, though specific roles are less detailed in the available sources.
The NANDA protocol introduces the concept of interaction coupons, designed to be verifiable and allow for the tracking of knowledge spreading across AI agents. This innovative feature shows potential evolutions in technology to accommodate numerous intelligent agents on the web, furthering the vision of a future where AI agents perform tasks online.
As the NANDA protocol moves from the research phase to early implementation, it represents a foundational step toward a large-scale interconnected ecosystem of autonomous AI agents operating across heterogeneous protocols like Anthropic’s MCP, Google’s A2A, and Microsoft’s NLWeb.
While a direct detailed roadmap or timeline beyond recent publications (July-August 2025) was not found, the project is clearly at an active research-to-development transition phase. As these partnerships mature and deployments begin, additional details are expected to emerge, painting a clearer picture of the future of AI-driven technology.
In summary, the NANDA protocol is a promising development in the field of artificial intelligence. By focusing on secure agent discovery, authentication, and interoperability, it lays the groundwork for the next-generation autonomous intelligent system infrastructure, bridging isolated AI agents into a joint verifiable ecosystem with strong enterprise governance and security models.
The NANDA protocol, with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) as a key partner, is developing a secure, multi-agent collaboration environment for autonomous AI agents in enterprise and consumer deployment, utilizing Zero Trust Agentic Access principles and interaction coupons for trustworthy data sharing and knowledge tracking. This venture, involving institutions like MIT, CMU, and Distributedapps.AI, holds the potential to revolutionize data-and-cloud-computing and enterprise tech applications by creating a large-scale, interconnected ecosystem of AI agents, leveraging artificial-intelligence to perform numerous online tasks.
