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Generative AI excels at creating text and code, but agents can struggle to present rich, interactive interfaces to users, especially when those agents are remote or running across trust boundaries.
A2UI is an open standard and set of libraries that allows agents to "speak UI." Agents send a declarative JSON format describing the intent of the UI. The client application then renders this using its own native component library (Flutter, Angular, Lit, etc.).
This approach ensures that agent-generated UIs are safe like data, but expressive like code.
High-Level Philosophy
A2UI was designed to address the specific challenges of interoperable, cross-platform, generative or template-based UI responses from agents.
The project's core philosophies:
- Security first: Running arbitrary code generated by an LLM may present a security risk. A2UI is a declarative data format, not executable code. Your client application maintains a "catalog" of trusted, pre-approved UI components (e.g., Card, Button, TextField), and the agent can only request to render components from that catalog.
- LLM-friendly and incrementally updateable: The UI is represented as a flat list of components with ID references which is easy for LLMs to generate incrementally, allowing for progressive rendering and a responsive user experience. An agent can efficiently make incremental changes to the UI based on new user requests as the conversation progresses.
- Framework-agnostic and portable: A2UI separates the UI structure from the UI implementation. The agent sends a description of the component tree and its associated data model. Your client application is responsible for mapping these abstract descriptions to its native widgets—be it web components, Flutter widgets, React components, SwiftUI views or something else entirely. The same A2UI JSON payload from an agent can be rendered on multiple different clients built on top of different frameworks.
- Flexibility: A2UI also features an open registry pattern that allows developers to map server-side types to custom client implementations, from native mobile widgets to React components. By registering a "Smart Wrapper," you can connect any existing UI component—including secure iframe containers for legacy content—to A2UI's data binding and event system. Crucially, this places security firmly in the developer's hands, enabling them to enforce strict sandboxing policies and "trust ladders" directly within their custom component logic rather than relying solely on the core system.
Use Cases
Some of the use cases include:
- Dynamic Data Collection: An agent generates a bespoke form (date pickers, sliders, inputs) based on the specific context of a conversation (e.g., booking a specialized reservation).
- Remote Sub-Agents: An orchestrator agent delegates a task to a remote specialized agent (e.g., a travel booking agent) which returns a UI payload to be rendered inside the main chat window.
- Adaptive Workflows: Enterprise agents that generate approval dashboards or data visualizations on the fly based on the user's query.
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Last modified 05 January 2026