Tech giants donate key AI agent tools to new Agentic AI Foundation, aiming to create open standards for interoperable autonomous systems.
Three of the world's leading AI companies have joined forces with the Linux Foundation to establish the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a new organization dedicated to developing open standards for the emerging era of AI agents.
The foundation, announced on December 9, 2025, brings together OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block as co-founders, with major technology players including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare joining as platinum members. The initiative represents an industry-wide push to prevent AI agent technology from fragmenting into incompatible proprietary systems.
"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 only open governance provides."
Key Technology Donations
Each founding company is contributing critical open-source technology to anchor the new foundation. Anthropic is donating its Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has become the universal standard for connecting AI models to tools, data, and applications.
In just one year since its release, MCP has achieved remarkable adoption, with more than 10,000 active public MCP servers deployed globally and integration into major platforms including ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code.
"MCP started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing," said Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. "A year later, it's become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools. Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven as it becomes critical infrastructure for AI."
OpenAI is contributing their AGENTS.md, a markdown-based standard that provides AI coding agents with project-specific guidance across different repositories and toolchains. The protocol has already been adopted by more than 60,000 open-source projects and integrated into leading agent frameworks including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Devin.
Block, the fintech company behind Square and Cash App, is donating Goose, an open-source agent framework that combines language models with extensible tools. "Getting it out into the world gives us a place for other people to come help us make it better," Brad Axen, Block's AI Tech Lead, told TechCrunch. "We have a lot of contributors from open source, and everything they do to improve it comes back to our company."
An Industry-Wide Commitment to Openness
The formation of the AAIF signals a broader industry consensus that the future of AI agents should be built on shared, interoperable standards rather than proprietary platforms.
Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block, framed the initiative in stark terms: "We're at a critical moment for AI. 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, open protocols, and open access for the benefit of all."
The AAIF will be funded through membership dues but structured to prevent any single member from controlling project roadmaps, which will be set by technical steering committees. The foundation aims to coordinate interoperability, safety patterns, and best practices specifically for AI agents.
For the broader tech ecosystem, the short-term benefits are clear: less time building custom connectors, more predictable agent behavior, and simpler deployment in security-conscious environments. The larger vision is more ambitious—creating an open, interoperable AI landscape reminiscent of the standards that built the modern web.
"An early indicator of success, in addition to adoption of these standards, would be the development and implementation of shared standards being used by vendor agents around the world," Zemlin said.
Whether the AAIF becomes foundational infrastructure or another industry alliance remains to be seen. But with the backing of the world's leading AI companies and the neutral governance of the Linux Foundation, the Agentic AI Foundation represents the most significant collaborative effort yet to shape how autonomous AI systems will operate in the years ahead.
