MCP vs A2A - A Complete Deep Dive

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard designed to unify the interface between large language model (LLM) agents and external tools, data sources, and memory systems. Unlike traditional API calls, MCP provides a contextualized, real-time JSON-RPC communication channel. In contrast, the Agent-to-Agent protocol (A2A) is conceived as a peer- to-peer communication standard enabling autonomous AI agents to coordinate tasks directly with each other.