Vinton Cerf, the internet co-architect and Google's outgoing chief internet evangelist, told the Open Frontier conference on June 30, 2026 that natural language is too ambiguous for reliable AI-agent-to-agent communication and predicted the rise of autonomous agents will force the AI industry back toward formal, standardized protocols. Speaking on a panel with Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia, Keras creator Francois Chollet, and others, Cerf said, "I don't think English is going to be the best choice ... precision for interagent interaction is going to be very, very important." He compared unconstrained natural-language agent chains to the children's telephone game, warning that meaning degrades across multi-agent handoffs. The remarks came as Cerf announced he is retiring from Google after 20 years. Cerf argued that "the agentic model of AI, with multiple agents from multiple sources interacting with each other, is going to force composability, and a requirement for interoperability and standardization." The panel focused on what makes open-source infrastructure durable, contrasting the internet's decentralized protocol model with today's concentration of advanced AI models inside a small number of well-resourced labs.