---
title: "Generative UI"
description: "Understanding AG-UI's relationship with generative UI specifications"
---

## **AG-UI and Generative UI Specs**

Several recently released specs have enabled agents to return generative UI, increasing the power and flexibility of the Agent&lt;-&gt;User conversation.

A2UI, MCP-UI, and Open-JSON-UI are all **generative UI specifications.** Generative UIs allow agents to respond to users not only with text but also with dynamic UI components.

| **Specification** | **Origin / Maintainer** | **Purpose**                                                                                                          |
| ----------------- | ----------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **A2UI**          | Google                  | A declarative, LLM-friendly Generative UI spec. JSONL-based and streaming, designed for platform-agnostic rendering. |
| **Open-JSON-UI**  | OpenAI                  | An open standardization of OpenAI's internal declarative Generative UI schema.                                       |
| **MCP-UI**        | Microsoft + Shopify     | A fully open, iframe-based Generative UI standard extending MCP for user-facing experiences.                         |

Despite the naming similarities, **AG-UI is not a generative UI specification** — it's a **User Interaction protocol** that provides the **bi-directional runtime connection** between the agent and the application.

AG-UI natively supports all of the above generative UI specs and allows developers to define **their own custom generative UI standards** as well.
