What Are The Protocols That Governed AI?

In the world of advance technology, rules are important. Much like everything else in the world, they abide by certain standards.

With the boom in personal computing came USB, a standard for transferring data between devices. With the rise of the internet came IP addresses, numerical labels that identify every device online. With the advent of email came SMTP, a framework for routing email across the internet.

These are protocols — the invisible scaffolding of the digital realm — and with every technological shift, new ones emerge to govern how things communicate, interact, and operate.

As the world enters an era shaped by AI, it will need to draw up new ones. But AI goes beyond the usual parameters of screens and code. It forces developers to rethink fundamental questions about how technological systems interact across the virtual and physical worlds.

How will humans and AI coexist? How will AI systems engage with each other? And how will we define the protocols that manage a new age of intelligent systems?

Across the industry, startups and tech giants alike are busy developing protocols to answer these questions. Some govern the present in which humans still largely control AI models. Others are building for a future in which AI has taken over a significant share of human labor.

"Protocols are going to be this kind of standardized way of processing non-deterministic information," Antoni Gmitruk, the chief technology officer of Golf, which helps clients deploy remote servers aligned with Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, told BI. Agents, and AI in general, are "inherently non-deterministic in terms of what they do and how they behave."

When AI behavior is difficult to predict, the best response is to imagine possibilities and test them through hypothetical scenarios. Does everything need a protocol? Definitely not. The AI boom marks a turning point, reviving debates over how knowledge is shared and monetized. McKinsey & Company calls it an "inflection point" in the fourth industrial revolution — a wave of change that it says began in the mid-2010s and spans the current era of "connectivity, advanced analytics, automation, and advanced-manufacturing technology." Moments like this raise a key question: How much innovation belongs to the public and how much to the market? Nowhere is that clearer than in the AI world's debate between the value of open-source and closed models. "I think we will see a lot of new protocols in the age of AI," Tiago Sada, the chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, the company building the technology behind Sam Altman's World. However, "I don't think everything should be a protocol."