The Linux Foundation announced the creation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) on December 9, 2025, in San Francisco, to foster open-source development of AI agents. Co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, the initiative includes donations of key projects: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose framework, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md. The foundation aims to promote interoperability and prevent fragmentation in AI agent technologies.
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), launched under the Linux Foundation's umbrella, seeks to provide a neutral platform for advancing autonomous AI systems that can make decisions and coordinate across tools. This move addresses the shift from conversational AI to agentic technologies, ensuring transparent and collaborative evolution through open governance.
Anthropic contributed its Model Context Protocol (MCP), released in November 2024, which has become a standard for connecting AI models to external tools, data, and applications. Over 10,000 MCP servers are now active, with adoption by platforms including Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, VS Code, and ChatGPT. 'MCP started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing,' said Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. 'A year later, it's become the industry standard... Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation as part of the AAIF ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven.'
Block donated goose, an open-source, local-first AI agent framework released in early 2025, which integrates language models with extensible tools using MCP standards for reliable workflows. 'We're at a critical moment for AI,' noted Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block. 'By establishing the AAIF... we're building the infrastructure for an AI future that benefits everyone.'
OpenAI provided AGENTS.md, released in August 2025, a markdown-based standard for guiding AI coding agents in repositories, adopted by over 60,000 open-source projects and tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor. 'For AI agents to reach their full potential, developers and enterprises need trustworthy infrastructure,' stated Nick Cooper, Member of the Technical Staff at OpenAI.
Platinum members include AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, with additional gold and silver tiers featuring companies like Cisco, IBM, and Salesforce. The AAIF will host events like the MCP Dev Summit in New York City on April 2-3, 2026. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, emphasized: 'Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides.' This collaborative effort aims to standardize protocols, enhance safety, and support widespread adoption of agentic AI.
