The Internet of Agents Vijoy Pandey, Ph.D January 22, 2025 And for the foreseeable future, there will always be humans in the loop for critical tasks or decisions, even with increasing agency provided to these multi-agent apps. This also aligns 15 with Cisco’s commitment to responsible AI development , which emphasizes transparency, fairness, and human oversight in all AI software. By building human-in-the-loop mechanisms directly into the Internet of Agents architecture, we ensure that AI agents remain accountable to human judgment while augmenting (rather than replacing) human decision-making in 16 critical domains . 3. The Internet of Agents This new AI-native world needs a communication layer—the Internet of Agents—to enable collaboration across the ecosystem of agentic applications of various kinds, from different vendors, sometimes across different industries (see the protein folding example above). • Just like the Internet, and the Cloud Internet that was built above it, this communication layer should allow for the discovery, reputation and authentication, connectivity and security of multi-agent apps of all types. • It should allow for communication between agentic apps and existing software and systems and allow for human-in-the-loop interactions. • In addition to deterministic communication (via current remote API mechanisms), this layer needs to support non-deterministic intent (“find the best price”), probabilistic outcomes and local optima (“this is the best price with 90% confidence in the time allotted”), goal-loop prevention (“I need to talk to a different agentic app”), large state exchanges (multi-modal state between agentic cores), ultra-low latency dense clus- ters for inference-heavy chain-of-thought use cases, assurance for agent-agent and agent-human communication, and so on. • A next-generation communication layer needs to have next-generation security: this Internet needs to have quantum-safe security built in to prevent current store-and- harvest attacks as well as to future-proof it when, not if, quantum nodes appear on this network. • This Internet needs to be open and interoperable. Any agent provider must be able to rd announce an agent or discover any 3 party agent through this Internet. Why? Because open systems drive maximal value for every entity in the ecosystem: infrastructure vendors, operators, app developers and consumers/customers. This will also mean a particular attention to the practitioner community at every layer—Apps, Platform or Infrastructure—which will also inform our funnel. 15 Cisco Responsible AI Framework 16 Responsible Scaling Policy, Anthropic ©2025 Outshift by Cisco and/or its afÏliates. All rights reserved. 8