From Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web to Agentic AI: A Unified Narrative of the Web of Agents

arXiv:2507.10644v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Web of Agents (WoA) transforms the document-centric Web into an environment of autonomous agents acting on users' behalf, a vision newly tractable as large language models (LLMs) mature. We argue that across three decades the WoA has undergone a semantic-effort migration in chronological order: from platform-side coordination (Multi-Agent Systems, GenerationI), through data-side annotation (Semantic Web, GenerationII), to model-side interpretation (LLM-era, GenerationIII). The central GenIIrightarrowGen~III transition within this trajectory, which we call the semantics-in-data rightarrow semantics-in-models shift, is predictive: each generation's failure modes and current open problems follow from where that generation located its semantic effort. The survey makes five contributions: (i)a unified evolutionary narrative spanning 1990--2026; (ii)a four-dimensional comparative framework (semantic foundation, communication paradigm, locus of intelligence, discovery mechanism) applied uniformly across all three generations; (iii)classification of sixteen representative systems on these dimensions, including hybrid LLM--knowledge-graph and computer-use agents; (iv)coverage of the November2024--August2026 institutional convergence (Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, A2A v1.0, MCP November2024 launch and November2025 specification, Visa/Mastercard/Stripe payment-network protocols, EU AI Act phased enforcement, the NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative, International AI Safety Report 2026); and (v)~seven named lessons grounded in cross-generational evidence paired with seven generation-invariant challenges that persist regardless of which protocol prevails. Further progress depends less on protocol design than on the socio-technical infrastructure now being assembled by standards bodies, regulators, and commercial payment networks.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-05-26