The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) on December 9, 2025, in San Francisco. The new organization launches with three donated projects: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose framework, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md specification.
AWS, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft join as platinum members alongside the three founding contributors.
What the Foundation Actually Does
The AAIF functions as a neutral governance body for open source AI agent infrastructure. Project roadmaps get set by technical steering committees rather than individual companies, according to Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation Executive Director.
"We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together," Zemlin said. "Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides."
The foundation operates through a "directed fund" model where companies pay membership dues but don't gain unilateral control over technical direction.
The Three Founding Projects
MCP, released by Anthropic in November 2024, has become the standard protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources. The protocol now powers more than 10,000 published MCP servers and has been adopted by 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, Anthropic's Chief Product Officer. "A year later, it's become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools."
MCP co-creator David Soria Parra told TechCrunch that neutrality drove the donation decision: "We're all better off if we have an open integration center where you can build something once as a developer and use it across any client."
Block's goose, released in early 2025, provides a local-first AI agent framework combining language models with MCP-based integration. The company says thousands of internal engineers use it weekly for coding, data analysis, and documentation.
OpenAI's AGENTS.md, released in August 2025, offers a markdown file format that tells AI coding tools how to behave within specific repositories. The specification has been adopted by more than 60,000 open source projects and works with Cursor, Devin, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI.
Who Joined and Why
The membership roster reads like a list of companies that don't want agent infrastructure controlled by rivals. Platinum members (AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI) share a stake in preventing proprietary lock-in.
Gold members include Cisco, Datadog, Docker, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify, Snowflake, and Twilio. Silver members range from Hugging Face and Uber to Zapier and ZED.
"The technology that will define the next decade can either remain closed and proprietary for the benefit of few, or be driven by open standards," said Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block.
Google Cloud's Richard Seroter framed it as a practical concern: "We want to help build a system where developers can trust that whatever they build in this new domain is interoperable."
What Happens Next
The first MCP Dev Summit takes place in New York City on April 2-3, 2026. European dates will be announced separately.
Whether AAIF becomes actual infrastructure or another industry consortium with a logo remains the open question. Zemlin suggested adoption metrics will be the test: "An early indicator of success would be the development and implementation of shared standards being used by vendor agents around the world."
