Agentic AI Foundation
The AI Industry's Most Important Open Standard
On December 9, something remarkable happened: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block—competitors in the AI race—donated their core agent technologies to the Linux Foundation. The Agentic AI Foundation is born.
What is the Agentic AI Foundation?
A vendor-neutral home for the protocols that will define how AI agents operate in enterprise environments.
On December 9, 2025, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block—direct competitors in the AI race—took the unprecedented step of donating their core agent technologies to the Linux Foundation.
The Donated Projects
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Donated by Anthropic
The "USB-C for AI"—a universal standard that connects LLMs to external tools, data sources, and APIs.
Published MCP Servers
Tool Integration
OpenAI, Microsoft, Google
AGENTS.md
Donated by OpenAI
A markdown standard for defining AI coding agent behavior—how they should interact with repositories, what permissions they have, and how they should operate.
Open Source Projects
Simple, Universal Format
Cursor, Copilot, Devin, Gemini
goose
Donated by Block
An open-source, local-first AI agent framework with MCP-based integration for trusted agentic workflows.
Privacy by Design
Built-in Integration
Fully Auditable
Founding Members
The heavyweights of AI and cloud infrastructure, united under one foundation:
AWS
Cloud
Anthropic
AI
Block
Fintech
Bloomberg
Finance
Cloudflare
Infrastructure
AI/Cloud
Microsoft
AI/Cloud
OpenAI
AI
Why This Matters for Infrastructure Teams
1. Security Through Transparency
Open governance means you can audit the protocols AI agents use to interact with your systems. No black boxes—every interaction is defined by public, reviewable specifications.
2. Interoperability
Standard protocols let AI agents from different vendors work together without custom integration. Build once, connect to any compliant agent.
3. No Vendor Lock-In
The foundation ensures no single company dominates how agents connect to your infrastructure. Your integrations work across the ecosystem.
The Bigger Picture
"We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together."
— Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation
What's Changing
- From chat interfaces to autonomous agents
- From single-vendor to multi-agent systems
- From proprietary protocols to open standards
What Teams Should Plan For
- AI agents as first-class infrastructure citizens
- Standardized, auditable agent protocols
- Multi-vendor agent orchestration
What This Means in Practice
For DevOps Teams
MCP servers become infrastructure components. You'll deploy, monitor, and secure them like any other service—but now with standardized protocols and cross-vendor compatibility.
For Platform Teams
AGENTS.md files define how AI interacts with your repositories. Platform teams can set organization-wide policies for agent behavior, permissions, and boundaries.
For Security Teams
Open protocols mean auditable agent interactions. Security teams can review, test, and validate how AI agents interact with systems—no more trusting vendor black boxes.
The Path to Open Agent Standards
Anthropic launches MCP
Model Context Protocol introduces universal tool integration for LLMs
OpenAI adopts MCP
Major validation as competitor embraces the standard
AGENTS.md gains traction
60,000+ projects adopt the markdown agent standard
AAIF Founded
Linux Foundation announces Agentic AI Foundation with founding members
Competitors United for Open Standards
When OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft agree on something, infrastructure teams should pay attention. The Agentic AI Foundation signals that AI agents are moving from experimental to enterprise-ready.
For DevOps and platform teams, this means planning for a world where AI agents are first-class citizens in your infrastructure—with standardized, auditable protocols.
Is your infrastructure ready for agentic AI?
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