The QUIC-native agent protocol.
AIRE — Agent Interchange Runtime Envelope — is a wire protocol for agent-to-agent communication. Open spec. Apache 2.0. Built for migration, multiplexed fan-out, semantic cancellation, and budget-aware backpressure.
The bet
The agent era is moving across HTTP. HTTP is wrong for agents — wrong for streaming, wrong for fan-out, wrong for migration, wrong for identity, wrong for cancellation, wrong for cost-aware backpressure.
The right altitude isn't a new layer-4 protocol. QUIC already fixed the transport. The opening is agent-native semantics on top — and that's what AIRE is.
The problem with HTTP for agents
Today's agent protocols — MCP, A2A, and the various HTTP-based ACPs — all live on HTTP. That makes adoption easy. It also ceilings adoption hard.
- Host-centric, not agent-centric. HTTP's connection model bakes in the assumption that the host is the endpoint. Agents migrate; hosts don't matter.
- Head-of-line blocking on fan-out. One byte stream, many logical streams stalled by one packet loss.
- Handshake tax. 2–3 RTT before the first useful byte. At fan-out scale, this dominates wall-clock.
- No semantic cancellation. HTTP cancel is connection-level. Agents need to abort one operation among many.
- Wrong backpressure model. HTTP flow control is bytes-of-buffer. The actual constraint for agents is tokens-of-context or dollars-of-budget.
- No protocol-level identity. Auth is bolted on via OAuth, downgraded constantly, replayable.
- No resumability. A 5-minute generation dies on a 1-second network blip.
The design
- Transport
- QUIC (RFC 9000). Connection-ID-based migration, multiplexed streams, 0-RTT, built-in TLS, escapes middlebox ossification.
- Frames
- Typed agent verbs:
HELLO,CAPABILITY,INVOKE,STREAM,CANCEL,BUDGET,DELEGATE,ERROR,GOODBYE. - Identity
- DID-based, signed, bound to streams — not connections. One connection can carry operations on behalf of many distinct agent identities.
- Addressing
aire://node-id/agent-id/operation- Backpressure
- Semantic. Tokens and dollars are first-class flow-control units, not bytes.
- Cancellation
- Per-operation, propagating to delegated sub-calls.
- Resumability
- Logical-operation resume across new connections.
Compared
| Transport | Migration | Stream HOL | Cancel | Budget BP | Identity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MCP | stdio / Streamable HTTP | — | inherits HTTP | crude | — | OAuth (bolted) |
| A2A | HTTP + SSE | — | inherits HTTP/2 | HTTP-cancel | — | OAuth (bolted) |
| HTTP-ACPs | HTTP | — | inherits HTTP | — | — | bolted |
| AIRE | QUIC | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ semantic | ✓ tokens + $ | ✓ DID per stream |
Roadmap
- v0.1 — frame types, handshake, basic semantics (in progress)
- v0.2 — capability negotiation, identity model
- v0.3 — budget / cancel / delegate semantics
- v0.4 — resumability, multipath
- v1.0 — frozen wire format, foundation donation
Governance
Currently led by a BDFL. Path to a neutral foundation (Linux Foundation / IETF) once the spec is proven and adopted. Read the governance doc.
Get involved
- Spec repository — read the draft, file issues, send PRs
- Go reference implementation
- Latest spec draft