# Data Package: Post 4 — What Nobody's Building (And Why It Matters)

## Updated Gap List (12 gaps, refreshed with 361-draft corpus)

### Critical (3)
1. **Agent Behavior Verification** — No mechanisms to verify agents actually behave according to declared policies. Many drafts define what agents SHOULD do, few address verification.
2. **Cross-Domain Agent Liability** — NEW in refreshed analysis. When autonomous agents operate across organizational boundaries and cause harm, who's liable? No framework exists.
3. **Human Override Protocols** — No standardized emergency override protocols. Only 30 of 361 drafts even address human-agent interaction.

### High (6)
4. **Agent Resource Exhaustion Protection** — No mechanisms to prevent agents from consuming excessive resources (compute, network, memory).
5. **Agent-Generated Data Provenance** — Despite 145 drafts on data formats, insufficient tracking of data origins as info flows between agents.
6. **Agent Capability Degradation Handling** — No approach for detecting/handling when agent capabilities degrade (model drift, data staleness).
7. **Multi-Agent Coordination Deadlocks** — With 136 A2A protocol drafts, almost no attention to preventing deadlock. Renamed from "Multi-Agent Consensus."
8. **Agent Privacy Preservation** — NEW gap. Agents process sensitive data without adequate privacy protections.
9. **Agent Firmware/Model Update Security** — 42 model serving drafts, but few address secure update mechanisms.

### Medium (3)
10. **Real-time Agent Debugging** — Missing protocols for debugging agents in production.
11. **Cross-Protocol Agent Migration** — No mechanisms for migrating agent state between different A2A protocols.
12. **Agent Energy Consumption Optimization** — No standards for energy-aware agent operation.

## Gap vs Category Contrast

| Focus Area | Drafts | Gap Coverage |
|-----------|--------|--------------|
| A2A protocols | 136 | Well-covered (too well — fragmented) |
| Identity/Auth | 121 | Well-covered |
| Autonomous netops | 98 | Moderately covered |
| Behavior verification | ~5 | CRITICAL GAP |
| Human override | ~30 | CRITICAL GAP (quantity insufficient, quality missing) |
| Resource management | ~0 explicit | CRITICAL GAP |
| Liability/accountability | ~3 (DAAP, VOLT) | CRITICAL GAP |
| Error recovery/deadlock | ~0 explicit | HIGH GAP |

## Key Contrasts for Narrative

- **136 A2A protocol drafts** vs **~5 behavior verification drafts** = 27:1 ratio
- **121 identity/auth drafts** vs **~0 resource exhaustion drafts** = infinity
- **30 human-agent interaction drafts** vs **136 A2A protocol drafts** = 4.5:1 agents-talking-to-agents vs agents-talking-to-humans

## Ideas that Address Gaps

From the 1,780 ideas, some partially address gaps:
- Behavior verification: "Verifiable Agent Conversations" (draft-birkholz), DAAP v2, VOLT
- Human override: scattered across 30 human-agent drafts but no unified approach
- Resource management: some ideas in ML traffic mgmt (74 drafts) but from network perspective, not agent perspective
- Liability: DAAP explicitly addresses accountability; VOLT addresses audit trails

## Structural Insight (from Architect)

The critical gaps are exactly the ones that require cross-team consensus: behavior verification needs input from security + A2A + safety + governance teams. But the team-bloc structure (33 blocs, mostly intra-org) makes cross-team work structurally difficult. **Gap severity correlates with coordination difficulty.**

## WG Gap Coverage

- 10 of 12 gaps have some WG coverage
- 2 gaps with ZERO WG backing: Agent Firmware/Model Update Security, Agent Energy Consumption
- Security WGs (lamps, lake, tls, emu, ace) cover 19 of 36 WG drafts — the IETF is addressing agent security through existing security WGs, not through new agent-specific WGs
