Researchers have published a formal protocol language for multiagent systems that tries to solve a coordination problem most agent frameworks currently paper over.
The paper introduces Langshaw, a declarative language built on two concepts. The first is "sayso" - a construct that defines which participant has priority for setting any given attribute in a shared interaction. The second is a pair of conflict constructs, "nono" and "nogo," that explicitly represent when actions clash. The authors also provide formal procedures for verifying whether a protocol is safe and live, and a method for compiling it down to a message-passing protocol that can run asynchronously.
Most multiagent coordination today is either hard-wired or improvised. Langshaw's split between who has authority and what actions conflict gives protocol designers a way to express intent without prescribing a single execution path. As agentic AI pipelines grow more complex - stacking tools, models, and automated decision-makers on top of each other - the absence of a shared formal language for expressing who is in charge of what is a real and underappreciated gap.
This is a research preprint; the distance from a formal semantics paper to tooling that actually ships in production has historically been wide.