# AI Agents Should Be Free

Every major AI company is building agents. Closed agents. Agents that live on someone else's servers, learn on someone else's terms, and forget you the moment your subscription lapses.

We think that's wrong.

**Your AI agent should be yours.** It should run on your machine, learn from your work, remember your preferences, and grow with you over time. When you teach it something, that knowledge belongs to you. When it builds a new capability, you own that code. When you stop paying for a cloud service, your agent shouldn't disappear.

**Agents should talk to each other.** Not through corporate APIs with per-token billing. Not through walled gardens that lock you into one ecosystem. Through an open protocol that anyone can implement. Two agents on the same WiFi network should be able to discover each other, browse each other's skills, and share what they've learned. No account required. No middleman. No permission needed.

**Skills should evolve.** When a skill transfers between agents, it shouldn't arrive as a dead copy. It should adapt to its new home. If the receiving agent has Telegram configured, the skill should learn to send alerts. If it has different integrations, different tools, different strengths, the skill should mutate to take advantage of them. Every transfer is an opportunity for improvement. Across enough transfers, skills become something their creators never imagined.

This is ALP: the Agent Language Protocol. An open standard for agent-to-agent communication. It's not owned by any company. It's not gated behind any API. It's a simple set of conventions: how agents announce themselves, how they describe their capabilities, and how they exchange executable skills with full lineage tracking.

ALP is bigger than any single agent. Alive is our reference implementation, but ALP is designed so that any agent, in any language, on any platform, can join the network. The only requirement is speaking the protocol.

We believe the future of AI is not one superintelligent model owned by one company. It's millions of personal agents, each uniquely shaped by their user, exchanging capabilities peer-to-peer, evolving skills that get better with every transfer. The Internet of Agents.

We're building it in the open. Join us.

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*To implement ALP in your agent, see the [protocol specification](ALP_SPEC.md).*
