The Intake — Wednesday, August 26, 2026

A2A and MCP are the two open protocols governing agent communication — A2A between independent agents, MCP between agents and tools or data sources. Google transferred A2A to the AAIF on August 20. The AAIF operates under the Linux Foundation and already hosts MCP.

The foundation has grown from 49 founding members in December 2025 to more than 250. Platinum-tier backers include AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

If you're deciding which of these protocols to support in your agent stack, they're no longer bets on competing governance structures — both sit under AAIF.

If you've been using Claude across Chat and Cowork and treating them as separate memory surfaces, that split closed on August 25. Anthropic merged the two systems into a single persistent store spanning both surfaces.

Memory updates continuously during conversations rather than summarizing at session end. Stored items are organized by topic, visible under Settings > Memory. You can view, edit, or delete individual items there. Per Anthropic's announcement, health information, race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, and political beliefs are excluded from storage by default. Government-issued IDs, Social Security numbers, criminal history, and immigration status are permanently excluded — that holds even if you've enabled the sensitive-topics toggle.

The feature is on by default for Free, Pro, and Max users across web, desktop, and mobile. Enterprise and Team organizations default to off. If you've built workflows that assumed separate Chat and Cowork memory stores, the assumption no longer holds.

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