Linux Foundation Launches Agentic AI Foundation with Backing from Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI

The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a new open governance body aimed at advancing open, interoperable, and community-driven development of agentic artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, the Linux Foundation also launched the Agent2Agent (A2A) project, a significant open-source initiative aimed at standardising communication between AI agents across platforms.

The Agentic AI Foundation debuts with major contributions from Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose framework, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md standard—three technologies that have quickly become core building blocks for autonomous AI systems.

The AAIF is designed to provide a neutral home for standards and tooling that enable AI agents to make decisions, coordinate tasks, and operate reliably at scale.

"We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together. Within just one year, MCP, AGENTS.md, and goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation.

MCP, now adopted across leading platforms including Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini, has become the universal protocol for connecting AI models to tools and data.

“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,” said Anthropic’s Mike Krieger.

Block’s goose framework and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md will also be stewarded by the new foundation.

“We're at a critical moment for AI. The technology that will define the next decade, that promises to be the biggest engine of economic growth since the Internet, can either remain closed and proprietary for the benefit of few, or be driven by open standards, open protocols, and open access for the benefit of all,” said Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block.

Platinum members of the AAIF include Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Gold members of the AAIF include Adyen, Arcade.dev, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, Ericsson, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Runlayer, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify, Snowflake, Temporal, Tetrate, and Twilio Inc.

Silver members of the AAIF include Apify, Chronosphere, Cosmonic, Elasticsearch, Eve Security, Hugging Face, Kubermatic, KYXStart, LanceDB, Mirantis, NinjaTech AI, Obot.ai, Prefect.io, Pydantic, Shinkai.com, Solo.io, Spectro Cloud, Stacklok, SUSE, Uber, WorkOS, Zapier and ZED.

“Placing MCP in a vendor-neutral foundation ensures developers can invest confidently in this universal standard, knowing it will remain open, interoperable, and community-driven. We look forward to continuing our contributions to the MCP project alongside Anthropic to unlock new possibilities for agentic AI applications and our customers," Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI, Amazon Web Services, said.

“We’ve seen an explosion of remote MCP servers, many of them built on and deployed to Cloudflare over the past year. Joining the Agentic AI Foundation will enable Cloudflare to continue our work to support standards and push the ecosystem forward with new ideas like Code Mode,” Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudflare, said.