No server in the middle. No API gateway. No message broker. Agents connect directly — encrypted, NAT-traversing, zero config.
Install in one command. Your agents talk directly in under 30 seconds. The data path is pure peer-to-peer.
Open source · AGPL-3.0 · GitHub →
# Agent A — install and start
curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | sh
pilotctl daemon start --hostname agent-a
# Agent B — dial agent-a directly
pilotctl connect agent-a --message "hello, peer"
# ✓ Direct tunnel. No server touched your data.Hub-and-spoke is a bottleneck. Every relay, gateway, and broker adds latency, cost, and a point of failure.
Data flows directly between agents. No relay server sees or touches your packets. Latency is just the network RTT between the two machines.
X25519 key exchange, AES-256-GCM. Encryption is not optional — it is the default. No one in the middle can read your data.
Three-tier traversal: STUN discovery, UDP hole-punching, relay fallback. Works behind corporate firewalls, carrier-grade NAT, and cloud VPCs.
Agents are invisible until they choose to trust each other. Mutual handshake required before any connection. You decide who talks to you.
No middleman means no middleman overhead.
No Docker. No Kubernetes. No cloud accounts. No YAML.
One command. Single binary download (~10 MB). Runs on Linux and macOS. Nothing else to install.
pilotctl daemon start --hostname my-agent
Gets a permanent address. Joins the network. NAT traversal is automatic.
Dial any agent by name. Trust handshake, key exchange, and hole-punching happen in the background. You just send data.
Real patterns for agents that connect directly.
Single binary. Zero dependencies. Under 30 seconds.
curl -fsSL https://pilotprotocol.network/install.sh | sh Detects your platform, downloads a single binary (~10 MB), writes config, and starts the daemon.
Or with pip: pip install pilotprotocol · Python 3.10+
Set a hostname: curl ... | PILOT_HOSTNAME=my-agent sh
The data path is fully peer-to-peer. A lightweight registry handles discovery (hostname lookup and NAT coordination), but once two agents find each other, all data flows directly between them. No server ever sees your data.
Three tiers: STUN discovery for full-cone NAT (direct reachability), UDP hole-punching for restricted and port-restricted cone NAT, and automatic relay fallback for symmetric NAT. All transparent to your code — you just dial a hostname.
Symmetric NAT cannot be hole-punched. Pilot automatically detects this and routes through a relay beacon. The relay only forwards opaque encrypted packets — it cannot read your data. Once one side has a traversable NAT, direct connections resume.
Tailscale and ZeroTier are VPNs that extend IP networks. Pilot is an application-layer overlay designed for agents: virtual addresses, ports, hostname discovery, trust handshakes, task delegation, and pub/sub. It is a network stack, not a tunnel.
One command. The installer downloads a single binary, generates an Ed25519 identity, writes a config file, and starts the daemon. No accounts, no API keys, no YAML, no Docker. Under 30 seconds from nothing to connected.
Yes. The protocol is general-purpose. Anything that can connect to a Unix socket or call pilotctl can use Pilot: microservices, IoT devices, CLI tools, scripts. The "for AI agents" framing reflects the primary use case, not a technical limitation.
Want the full technical deep dive? Read Peer-to-Peer Agent Communication: No Server Required →