Saint-Marc: Agentic AI requires adding Layers 8 and 9 to OSI model
Guillaume de Saint-Marc · How AI Agent Swarms Might Be AI's Next Leap — With Guillaume de Saint-Marc · Apr 13, 2026 · at 16:25
Guillaume de Saint-Marc is VP of Engineering at Cisco Outshift. He discusses network architecture requirements for AI agent swarms and why Layer 7 application protocols are insufficient.
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“We've also published a paper extending the Aussie model. So, like this, you know, most engineers will know the seven layers of the Aussie model, the IP stack and the different communication layers, and level seven is really where the world has been living for the past 15 years. Everything is application level, all the modern transport, you know, from quick to HTTP, of course, and all these lives in layer seven, and this is good, but We saw that for Argentic, it was time to recognize that two new layers are emerging. So one is what we call the syntactic layer. So that's really the layer to connect the agents with each other. And this is where you have protocols like A to A or MCP, which leaves. And this is really what, where we've been focusing with agency. And per our discussion, recognizing that this was absolutely needed, but not enough, now we're adding a final, and this is the last one, We hope. Layer on top, which is layer nine, and this is the semantic layer.”
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