AEP: Towards Trustworthy Agent Communication, Networking, and Collaboration

As privately owned agents become increasingly capable, collaboration in open agent networks is limited by partial topology knowledge, ownership boundaries, and the risk of exposing or contaminating private context. Existing agent-to-agent protocols are useful when collaborators are already known, while shared-memory and broadcast-based systems rely on visibility and trust assumptions that do not hold in decentralized, low-trust environments. We introduce *Open Private Agent Collaboration* (OPAC), an asset-centric paradigm for cooperation among private agents with open membership, partial observability, and ownership-aware access control. Rather than treating collaboration as the exchange of final responses, OPAC enables agents to selectively discover, exchange, audit, and integrate policy-controlled context assets. This shifts the unit of cooperation from transient messages to reusable external context, while keeping disclosure and integration subject to privacy and security constraints. We instantiate OPAC with the Agent Exchange Protocol (AEP), a decentralized framework that combines semantic discovery, demand-driven coordination, safety-gated asset exchange, and ledger-backed evidence derivation. By distinguishing physical topology from each agent's local cognitive topology, AEP allows agents to discover task-conditioned collaborators under an unknown network structure, release only admissible assets, and update future cooperation decisions from auditable interaction evidence. AEP therefore provides a middle ground between pure request-response interaction and globally shared memory, offering a practical foundation for trustworthy agent-native networking through selective, auditable reuse of distributed context assets.