AXP platform links AI agents in joint trials in China

Two software agents, built by different companies in different regions, need to find each other in the middle of a task. Everything depends on that first handshake. On October 16, at the 10th Future Network Development Conference in Nanjing, Purple Mountain Laboratories unveiled AXP, a platform that sets out to make that handshake predictable rather than best-effort.

The idea rests on what the developers call deterministic networking. On an ordinary internet link, traffic arrives on a best-effort basis. Deterministic networking instead guarantees bounded, predictable delivery for the traffic it carries within a domain. AXP applies that principle to agents, and it also resolves what the team calls semantic addresses: an agent is located by what it does, not by a fixed address. The platform was developed with China Mobile, Jiangsu Future Network Group and the Jiangsu Future Networks Innovation Institute.

The announced figures are large. AXP supports registration of up to a million agents, with 100,000 running at the same time. It schedules computing and network resources together, converts between the different protocols used by heterogeneous agents, detects failures and switches over within seconds, and resolves semantic addresses in about a hundred milliseconds. Tests on CENI, China's national large-scale experimental facility for future networks, reportedly achieved agent addressing across domains more than 4,000 kilometers apart, and cut end-to-end task execution time by more than 20%. Those numbers come from the developers, and the announcement does not say what the 20% is measured against.

Several questions remain open. The developers describe AXP as the industry's first agent interconnection platform built on deterministic networking, a claim that has not been independently verified. The materials do not say which agent protocols AXP translates between, nor whether it supports widely used open standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or Agent2Agent (A2A). The meaning of the AXP acronym was not given.

For now, the practical beneficiaries are the partners who are testing it. Purple Mountain Laboratories says joint testing and industrial validation have begun with telecom operators, communication equipment makers and a large steel manufacturer, across several scenarios. For companies that run many agents across sites, the question is whether a guaranteed-delivery layer can justify its cost against simpler links. That answer will depend on results from those trials. No commercial availability date or pricing has been announced, so nobody outside the test group can yet plan around AXP.