What AWP is and is not

AWP is a specification, not a platform. It describes in a vendor-neutral, machine-readable way:

what an agentic workflow does: agents, tools, steps, triggers, inputs;
within which limits it may run: budgets, permissions, environments;
under which governance it runs: ownership, data classification, data residency, model governance, human approval, risk levels, separation of duties, supply-chain integrity;
what it leaves behind: audit events, decision traces, reproducibility records.

A runtime reads a manifest, validates it, enforces its limits and governance rules while executing it, and emits audit events with standardized semantics.

apiVersion: awp.agenticworkflowprotocol.org/v1alpha1
kind: Workflow
metadata:
  name: vulnerability-fixer
  version: 0.1.0
  owner:
    team: security-team

Relationship to MCP and A2A

Protocol	Scope
MCP	Agents to tools and resources
A2A	Agent to agent communication
AWP	Definition, governance, execution and audit of agentic workflows

AWP does not replace MCP or A2A. See Relationship to other protocols.

What AWP is not

Not a runtime, a hosting service or a product. OpenAgentix is one implementation.
Not a compliance certification. AWP offers primitives; compliance depends on the implementation and the organization.
Not a standard for model reasoning. It standardizes events, inputs, outputs, decisions and policy results, not private chain-of-thought.

Possible runtimes

The diagram on the homepage shows AWP above A2A and MCP. Any runtime can sit under a manifest; which runtimes exist today is listed on the implementations page.