# Surprising Findings — Deep Analysis Phase

These findings challenge assumptions or reveal unexpected patterns in the 361-draft corpus.

## 1. The Keyword Expansion Uncovered a Different Community

The 101 new drafts from keywords (mcp, agentic, inference, generative, intelligent, aipref) brought:
- **154 new authors** (557 total, up from 403)
- **46 new organizations** (230 total, up from 184)
- Heavy skew toward ML infrastructure: "ML traffic mgmt" went from 23 to 73 drafts, "Model serving/inference" from 13 to 42

This means the original analysis systematically missed the ML infrastructure community. The "agent" keyword captured the protocol designers; "inference" and "generative" captured the infrastructure builders. These are largely separate communities working on adjacent problems.

## 2. The Safety Ratio Improved — But It's an Illusion

The safety ratio went from 4:1 (260 drafts) to ~8:1 by tag count but the improvement is because the ML infrastructure drafts have broader category tags (many touch "safety" tangentially through network reliability). The core agent protocol space remains deeply safety-deficient.

## 3. Huawei's Nov 2025 Coordinated Campaign

Five Huawei authors each submitted 19-21 drafts in a single month (Nov 2025). This is the largest coordinated submission campaign in the dataset. Zhenbin Li, Qiangzhou Gao, and Xiaotong Shang all published exclusively in Nov 2025. This looks like a strategic push timed for IETF 121 (Dublin, Nov 2025).

## 4. Quality Inversely Correlates with Quantity

| Pattern | Examples | Avg Composite |
|---------|----------|---------------|
| High volume, low quality | Huawei (57 drafts, 3.11), CAICT (6, 2.35), Futurewei (6, 2.67) | ~2.7-3.1 |
| Low volume, high quality | AWS (3, 4.38), Aiiva.org (3, 4.42), Mozilla (4, 3.81) | ~3.8-4.4 |
| Exception | Tsinghua (16, 3.53), Five9 (10, 3.75) | High both |

The top-rated organizations are nearly all low-volume Western/independent contributors. Volume does not predict quality.

## 5. The Agent Ecosystem is Being Built in Security WGs, Not Agent WGs

19 of 36 WG-adopted drafts (53%) are in security WGs (lamps, lake, tls, emu, ace). Only 2 are in the agent-specific "aipref" WG. The IETF isn't creating new infrastructure for agents — it's adapting existing security infrastructure. This is arguably the right approach but means agent-specific concerns (behavior verification, human override) have no natural WG home.

## 6. The 14-Author Mega-Draft Consortium

One draft about AI inference networking has 14 co-authors from 14 different organizations (Hygon, China Mobile, Tencent, Huawei, Broadcom, Ruijie, Metanet, Biren, Baidu, Moore Threads, Resnics, Centec, Cloudnine, Enflame). This is by far the broadest cross-org collaboration in the dataset — and it's focused on ML infrastructure, not agent protocols.

## 7. Jonathan Rosenberg Is the Western Counterweight

Five9's Jonathan Rosenberg (9 drafts, composite 3.75) is the only Western individual matching Huawei's output volume. His drafts (AAuth, NACT, aiproto) represent a coherent vision for agent communication — arguably the closest thing to a Western "ecosystem proposal" matching Huawei's breadth.

## 8. The Accountability Drafts Are the Best-Scored

The top 3 drafts by composite score are ALL about accountability/verification:
1. DAAP v2 (Distributed AI Accountability Protocol) — 4.75
2. EDHOC Application Profiles — 4.75
3. VOLT (Verifiable Operations Ledger and Trace) — 4.75

The market is hungry for safety/accountability solutions — when they appear, they're rated highest. The problem isn't that safety work is unwanted; it's that few teams are doing it.

## 9. OAuth 2.0 Is the Undisputed Foundation

RFC 6749 (OAuth 2.0) is cited by 36 drafts — more than any non-boilerplate RFC. The agent identity ecosystem is essentially an OAuth ecosystem. Any agent auth approach that doesn't build on OAuth will face adoption headwinds.

## 10. Two Gaps Have Zero Institutional Backing

"Agent Firmware/Model Update Security" and "Agent Energy Consumption Optimization" have zero WG-adopted drafts addressing them. These represent the intersection of importance and neglect — critical infrastructure needs that no working group has prioritized.
