The Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), backed by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI. Other members include Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft.
The new foundation aims to provide a neutral, open governance structure for the emerging ecosystem of agentic AI systems. The AAIF brings together tools and standards that enable autonomous AI agents to operate across applications and environments.
As part of the launch, OpenAI is bringing AGENTS.md, a markdown-based standard that offers project-specific instructions for AI agents. Meanwhile, Anthropic announced that it is donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the AAIF. Block is contributing Goose, its open-source framework for building and running AI agents.
These founding projects offer shared infrastructure for interoperability and predictable agent behaviour.
“We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together,” 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 open governance provides.”
MCP, released by Anthropic in 2024, has become widely adopted as a standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications. Anthropic reports more than 10,000 MCP servers across enterprise and developer environments. MCP is currently used by platforms including Claude, 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. “Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven as it becomes infrastructure for AI.”
Block’s goose, introduced in 2025, is an open-source, local-first AI agent framework built around MCP for tool and workflow integration. It provides a structured environment for building and running agentic processes.
“We’re at a critical moment for AI,” said Manik Surtani, head of open source at Block. “By establishing the AAIF, Block and this group of industry leaders are taking a stand for openness. Contributing goose ensures that agentic AI remains shaped by the community.”
OpenAI’s AGENTS.md standard, launched in 2025, gives AI coding agents consistent project-level instructions across repositories and toolchains. The markdown-based format is already used by more than 60,000 open-source projects and frameworks such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI and VS Code.
“For AI agents to reach their full potential, developers and enterprises need trustworthy infrastructure and accessible tools to build on,” said Nick Cooper, member of the technical staff at OpenAI. “By co-founding the AAIF and donating AGENTS.md, we’re helping establish open, transparent practices that make AI agent development more predictable and interoperable.”
Open Standards for Agentic AI
Developers are building AI agents for coding, workflow automation and customer service, with many now shifting from prototypes to production use. OpenAI said the industry needs shared standards to avoid fragmentation.
“Open standards make agents safer, easier to build, and more portable across tools and platforms,” the company said, adding that without common conventions, development risks diverging into incompatible silos.
Over the past year, OpenAI has released several components meant to support an open agentic ecosystem, including the Agents SDK, Apps SDK, the Agentic Commerce Protocol, gpt-oss models and the Codex CLI.
OpenAI said it has also contributed to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is now integrated into ChatGPT connectors and apps. Last week, OpenAI, Anthropic and MCP-UI extended the Apps SDK to all MCP developers through MCP Apps.
Governance and Participation
AAIF will operate as a directed fund within the Linux Foundation. The organisation has invited tool builders, researchers and enterprises to participate in shaping future standards.
The foundation will support open development, long-term sustainability and collaborative governance.
Gold members include Cisco, Datadog, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify, Snowflake and Twilio; Silver members include Hugging Face, Uber, Zapier, SUSE and Mirantis.
The Linux Foundation has previously stewarded projects such as the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js and PyTorch.
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