They're Making TCP/IP For AI, And It's Called NANDA

Forbes

29-04-2025

Not too long ago, I realize that there's a new type of standard reinventing the web that hardly anyone is talking about – yet.
Let's start with the name: Networked Agents and Decentralized AI or NANDA is a web protocol for AI agents that's largely being worked on right here at MIT.
Here's an important note – in terms of design context, NANDA builds on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) that provides for standardized transactions between AI agents. NANDA adds Internet capability and protocols, so that these agents can 'do things' over the web.
That's it, in a nutshell, but getting there is going to take work. What I found really interesting is that hardly anyone knows that this effort is taking place.
I hadn't heard of NANDA before, so I did a quick web search. I mostly came up with something related to the nursing industry, and alternately, a name for an LLM project geared towards the Hindi language.
However, some of the authors of a paper on NANDA have released items to LinkedIn explaining how this protocol is going to work.
'Just as DNS revolutionized the internet by providing a neutral framework for web access, we need a similar infrastructure for the 'Internet of Agents,'' writes Ayush Chopra, a PhD candidate at MIT who is working on this idea. 'We're launching NANDA - an open protocol for registry, verification, and reputation among AI agents - in collaboration with national labs and global universities (decentralized across 8 time zones) - NANDA will pave the way for seamless collaboration across diverse systems, fully compatible with enterprise protocols like MCP and A2A. This initiative is a step toward democratizing agentic AI, creating an ecosystem where specialized agents can work together to solve complex challenges—just like DNS did for the web.'
As for ChatGPT, when I asked the model 'what is NANDA for the web?' it came back with items about the nursing organization.
I had to specifically ask for the full name of the project, Networked Agents and Decentralized AI, but it did attribute this to the MIT Media Lab, and Ramesh Raskar, a friend and colleague of mine, in particular. It came up with this very quick dual response, which I thought was pretty much on point:
✅ Yes, there is a newer field or research project called NANDA — Networked Agents and Decentralized AI.
✅ It's completely different from the nursing NANDA.
That's a good start (and ChatGPT did provide more) – but we can get more from the people who are actually involved.
Now let's go to Raskar himself speaking at an Imagination in Action event earlier in April.
In it, he explained that NANDA is really a protocol for the Internet, the 'TCP/IP of AI' (I thought that was so good, I made it the title of this piece.'
He talked about how the Internet is for computers, but the World Wide Web is for people. NANDA is for AI agents, he explained, to be able to use the Internet in the same ways as people do.
As an example, Raskar talked about the challenge of planning a birthday party for a child, in which one could conceivably use AI agents to buy cake and balloons and other items, and make all of this process automated.
As for buy-in, he said NANDA has active DNS registration at 15 major universities. He mentioned a three-part process for deployment: 1. host registration, 2. build APIs 3. connect to open source.
Later, Raskar was asked a series of questions by Aaron Pressman, and talked about how this may roll out in the future.
'Everybody's craving something that's open and vibrant,' he said. 'MIT has a history. We are deeply inspired by Tim Berners Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium right here at MIT, you know, that really showed how we can create this open, vibrant web from the early '90s to about '95. And that really unleashed (a lot of) economic value.'
Calling for projects that are 'ambitious, open and inclusive,' Raskar put forth the idea that we are now in a 'wisdom economy,' as opposed to a transaction or knowledge economy.
'We can imagine billions and trillions of dollars of value being created when each one of us has the ability to create our own AI agents, every shop, every individual, every organization, can train and deploy their own agents,' he said, promoting NANDA as a platform to 'build the commerce backbone' that will drive the new Web.
I thought this was interesting: Raskar, in his talk, and Chopra, in his written explanation, introduced us to a new term: A2A – Agent to Agent.
In talking about the use of cryptography and smart contracts, Raskar also gave us 'Know Your Agent' (KYA) presumably as a correlate to the Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols in place in crypto.
'If you think about the internet stack,' he said, 'we left things like Yelp … in the application layer, because (they include) the human messiness of scoring. But because this is agent-to-agent communication, lot of interactions are algorithmic.'
Raskar's presentation helps us to put NANDA in context, and understand what it's for as well as what it's likely to do. I was excited about this partly because it's not really common knowledge yet.
In the beginning, we had Web 1.0 – the read-only web, where people were mostly just looking at text and images coded in HTML.
Web 2.0 was the read/write web, where web users could put information into web forms and send it back to a webmaster or host.
Web 3.0 is the read/write/function web, where people could send information both ways, and/or utilize functions built into web technology.
Web 4.0 is where machines are going to be doing all those things for us, and we're going to sit back and enjoy the music.
At least, that's the idea.
Look for this work to continue and really make its way into the public consciousness rather soon.