Agent Privacy-Preserving Protocol - AP3
What is AP3?
Agent Privacy-Preserving Protocol (AP3) is an open protocol for privacy-preserving collaboration between autonomous agents, extending the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, designed to solve a critical challenge in the emerging agentic communication:
How can AI agents collaborate on sensitive computations while maintaining data confidentiality and competitive advantage?
Traditional agent communication requires data sharing, which creates risks:
- Competitive Intelligence Leakage: Proprietary algorithms, cost structures, and business strategies could be exposed
- Regulatory Compliance Issues: Data sharing may violate privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA
- Trust Barriers: Parties are reluctant to collaborate without cryptographic privacy guarantees
AP3 addresses these challenges by providing a standardized framework for AI agents to perform privacy-preserving computation using advanced cryptographic techniques. The protocol is available as an extension for the open-source Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, with more integrations in progress.
Build agents with
ADK
(or any framework), equip with
MCP
(or any tool), collaborate via
A2A, and use
AP3 for secure collaboration between AI agents.
About the acronym
AP3 (pronounced "A-P-three") stands for Agent Privacy-Preserving Protocol, where each letter represents the first capital letter of each word: Agent, Privacy, Preserving, Protocol. The protocol is commonly referred to as AP3 for brevity.
Motivation
As the agentic economy grows, AP3 will become essential infrastructure for trusted, privacy-preserving computation between autonomous agents, enabling a new generation of collaborative AI applications that respect data sovereignty and competitive advantage. Current A2A implementations require agents to either:
- Share raw data with collaborating agents (privacy risk)
- Refuse collaboration altogether (functionality loss)
- Implement ad-hoc encryption schemes (interoperability issues)
AP3 protocol addresses these challenges by:
- Privacy-Preserving Collaboration: Agents compute on encrypted data without decryption
- Strong Cryptographic Guarantees: Cryptographic security ensures data confidentiality
- Interoperability: Standard protocol for secure multi-party computation
- Enterprise Compliance: Meet regulatory requirements for data protection
AP2 and AP3
- AP2 is the payment-focused protocol in the Agent2Agent ecosystem. It facilitates settlement, value transfer, and other financial primitives between agents.
- AP3 is a privacy-preserving collaboration protocol that lets agents jointly compute on sensitive data without revealing it.
- You can use AP2 and AP3 together: AP2 handles payments, while AP3 handles collaborative computation when parties need cryptographic privacy guarantees.
Build with AP3
AP3 provides a mechanism for secure agent collaboration, and it's part of a larger picture to unlock the full potential of autonomous agents. AP3 will be continuously evolving and we actively seek your feedback and contributions to help build the future of privacy-preserving agent collaboration.
The complete technical specification, documentation, and reference implementations are hosted in our public GitHub repository.
You can contribute to the project by opening an issue or submitting a pull request.