The Linux Foundation today announced that it is forming the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to promote transparent and collaborative evolution of agentic AI.
Three major projects have been donated to the foundation at launch: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. Additionally, AAIF member Obot.ai will donate its MCP Dev Summit events and podcast to the foundation.
MCP is a protocol developed by Anthropic that allows AI agents to access tools, data, and applications. It has been adopted by AI platforms like Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, VS Code, and ChatGPT, and over 10,000 MCP servers have been created since it was open sourced in 2024.
“Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation as part of the AAIF ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven as it becomes critical infrastructure for AI,” said Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic. “We remain committed to supporting and advancing MCP, and with the Linux Foundation’s decades of experience stewarding the projects that power the internet, this is just the beginning.”
The second project, Goose, is an open-source AI agent framework developed by Block (creator of payment services like Square and Cash App) for building and executing agent workflows that incorporates language models, tools, and standardized MCP-based integration.
And finally, OpenAI’s AGENTS.md is a universal standard for giving coding agents project-specific guidance so that they can act reliably across different repositories and toolchains.
“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. “Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides. The Linux Foundation is proud to serve as the neutral home where they will continue to build AI infrastructure the world will rely on.”
The AAIF is launching with several members, including larger platinum members Amazon, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI; gold members Adyen, Arcade.dev, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, Ericsson, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Runlayer, SAP, Snowflake, Temporal, Tetrate, and Twilio Inc.; and silver members Chronosphere, Cosmonic, Elasticsearch, Eve Security, Hugging Face, Kubermatic, KYXStart, LanceDB, NinjaTech AI, Obot.ai, Prefect.io, Pydantic, Shinkai.com, Spectro Cloud, Stacklok, SUSE, Uber, WorkOS, and ZED.
More information about the new foundation can be found on its website here.