Microsoft Autogen Has Split in 2... Wait 3... No, 4 Parts

One of the most popular open-source frameworks of 2023, which explored the application of AI agents and Multi-agent collaboration, has recently seen team separation and the formation of new products.

Back in September, a few original creators of Autogen parted their way with Microsoft creating a GH fork of the original project. Eventually, in November they settled on creating a new AG2 GitHub Org and new repo (this time a fresh one not leading back to the original repo) while inheriting PiPy autogen and pyautogen packages (that's where they push their updates) and Discord channel.

At the same time, Microsoft has introduced a complete rewrite called Autogen 0.4 which is available at the master branch of the original repo. Yet there's a legacy 0.2 version maintained by the community and available in a separate branch of the original repo. Both versions are available in a new PiPy repo called autogen-agentchat.

Recently Microsoft announced that they are planning on brining Autogen's 0.4 multi-agent runtime into Semantic Kernel (promising seamless transition from Autogen to SK), essentially introducing the 4th reincarnation of Autogen. Starting in early 2025 they intend to ship agent runtime as part of SK repo providing production support while leaving the maintenance of the original repo to the community.

That's quite a mouthful, here's my attempt to order the links:

1. Complete rewrite, Autogen 0.4 with different architecture
- Developed in the master branch on the original Microsoft repo: https://github.com/microsoft/autogen
- Not backward compatible
- Maintained by community
- Available as autogen-agentchat==0.4.0.dev6 PiPy package (marked as Pre-Release version) and autogen-core

2. Legacy Autogen 0.2
- Developed in 0.2 branch in the original Microsoft repo https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/tree/0.2
- Backward compatible
- Maintained by community
- Available as autogen-agentchat~=0.2 PiPy package (marked as Release version, currently at version 0.2.38)

3. AG2 branched out by original creators:

• New repo: https://github.com/ag2ai/ag2
• Community Discord: https://discord.gg/pAbnFJrkgZ
• Backward compatible
• Available as ag2, autogen, and pyautogen PiPy package (pointing to identical code)
• Currently at v0.3.2 and no breaking changes are planned for 0.4.x

4. Semantic Kernel that will eventually merge parts of Autogen 0.4

• Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel
• Maintained by Microsoft
• Based on how I read the SK blog post, this is a recomended option in 2025, offering seamless migration from Autogen 0.4, better support and stability

P.S>

Here's a statement from MS Autogen camp regarding "clones". Seems they wanted to have pyautogen PyPi package pointing to their repo ("The current pyautogen package isn’t affiliated with Microsoft AutoGen, and admin access is blocked for us"), as well as Discord.

After all, there're 5 packages related to Autogen:

• AG2: autogen, pyautogen, ag2,
• MS: autogen-agentchat and autogen-core