Anthropic Donates the MCP Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol is only a year old, but has quickly become the default for large language models (LLMs) to access data, tools and services in agentic loops. Now, Anthropic is moving it into a newly founded open source foundation under the Linux Foundation: the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).

The foundation is launching with two additional projects in its stable: goose, Block’s AI agent framework, and AGENTS.md from OpenAI, which has become the de facto standard format for providing context like coding guidelines, build steps and more to coding agents.

Moving MCP into a neutral foundation has been a long time coming (and then arrived a day earlier than planned). Various Linux Foundation representatives had been hinting at this move for a while and as OpenAI’s Nick Cooper told me, the actual process of starting the foundation started in earnest about four months ago. “But to me, moving to the Linux Foundation was always going to happen. We just didn’t know exactly when,” he said.

Given the popularity of MCP and AGENTS.md, especially, it’s no surprise that the membership of the new foundation is a who’s who of frontier model companies, leaders in the agentic AI coding space and various startups that also use these tools.

The Platinum members of the new foundation are Amazon, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Other members include Adyen, Cisco, Datadog, Docker, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Runlayer, SAP, Snowflake, Temporal, Tetrate and Twilio, among others, at the Gold level. Silver members include Chronosphere, Cosmonic, Elasticsearch, Hugging Face, Kubermatic, Pydantic, Spectro Cloud, SUSE, Uber, WorkOS, and ZED.

Obot.ai, another Silver member, has donated its MCP Dev Summit events to the foundation, meaning the first official AAIF event will be the MCP Dev Summit in New York in April of next year.

“MCP started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing. When we open sourced it in November 2024, we hoped other developers would find it as useful as we did,” said Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. “[…] 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. 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.”

And while the foundation is starting out with this initial set of contributions, the idea is clearly to add additional open source tools in the agentic AI space over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a new agent framework join soon, for example.

As with all similar Linux Foundation foundations, the core idea here is to provide a neutral home to these foundational projects. “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,” explained Swami Sivasubramanian, the VP of Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services.

OpenAI’s Cooper told me that the company’s motivation for donating Agents.MD were similar. “It’s very much like all our technical efforts with open source, be it for Agents.MD, other open source initiatives, and also with our engagements around MCP,” he said. “We’re just looking to drive to create this open, neutral space where we can get meaningful contributions from others, get feedback from the developer community and the user community, and really help build and refine all these protocols to be really quite meaningful.”