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Group Type

Working Group

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Mission Statement

The Agents Working Group exists to make interactions with agent-backed systems interoperable over MCP. Today, these systems are typically exposed as ordinary tools or through framework-specific integrations, leaving durable execution, capability discovery, delegation, and multi-turn interaction to ad hoc conventions. The WG stewards Tasks as MCP’s foundation for durable asynchronous execution and evaluates which remaining gaps require protocol support. Based on production use cases and prototypes, the group will either evolve Tasks, introduce an Agents Extension that complements it, or document how existing MCP primitives should be used consistently.

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Scope

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In Scope

  • Tasks: Stabilization of the io.modelcontextprotocol/tasks extension and its promotion into the core MCP protocol, including collecting implementation feedback, resolving ambiguities, and evaluating proposed changes to its lifecycle.
  • Agents Extension Evaluation: Evaluate agent-backed MCP use cases, including agent-as-tool, remote-agent, and supervisor/sub-agent patterns, to determine whether an Agents Extension is needed to complement Tasks.
  • Prototypes and Proposals: Develop narrowly scoped proofs of concept where they help determine whether to introduce an Agents Extension, evolve Tasks, or rely on existing MCP primitives.
  • Implementation Coordination: Coordinate with SDK and conformance maintainers on implementation feedback, examples, and coverage for specifications owned by the group.
  • Cross-Cutting Concerns: Coordinate with relevant groups when Tasks or evaluated agent use cases raise transport, events, skills, authorization, metadata, or external-interoperability questions.
  • Documentation: Maintain the Tasks specification and document agent-backed MCP use cases, findings, and any proposals adopted by the group.

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Out of Scope

  • Building or standardizing general-purpose agent frameworks and runtimes, including internal choices about planning, memory, model selection, and orchestration. The group standardizes behavior at MCP interoperability boundaries rather than host or server implementation internals.
  • Transport wire formats and session mechanics, which are owned by the Transports WG.
  • General event delivery and callback mechanisms, which are owned by the Triggers and Events WG.
The charter does not predetermine where inference or agent loops run, or whether a particular capability belongs in Tasks, an Agents Extension, or existing MCP primitives. The WG evaluates those questions through its design work.
  • Transports WG - Task polling, multi-round-trip requests, stateless operation, and request association depend on transport and message-flow semantics.
  • Triggers and Events WG - Proactive task-status and completion notifications are event-delivery concerns owned by that group.

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Leadership

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Authority & Decision Rights

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Membership

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Operations

Meetings are published at meet.modelcontextprotocol.io. Discord: #agents-wg

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Resources

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Deliverables & Success Metrics

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Active Work Items

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Success Criteria

  • Tasks is fully stabilized based on implementation feedback and promoted from an extension into the core MCP protocol.
  • Lifecycle ambiguities and conformance gaps that block Tasks stabilization are resolved or explicitly dispositioned.
  • The group publishes an evaluation of whether an Agents Extension is needed to complement Tasks, supported by documented use cases and relevant prototype evidence.
  • Based on that evaluation, the group either evolves Tasks, proposes an Agents Extension, or documents how existing MCP primitives are sufficient.
  • Proposed agent protocol surface is evaluated through prototypes and implementation feedback before being advanced.

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Changelog