Last year, LLMs were the dominant trend in the technology world. This year, the industry has realized that LLMs alone are not sufficient and that AI agents are the need of the hour. Consequently, every major technology company has announced products and services centered around AI agents. However, many of these offerings rely on proprietary technologies, making them less interoperable.
To address this problem, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block have founded the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s Goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md are now part of this new foundation. The AAIF will serve as a neutral, open foundation to advance the adoption of leading open source AI projects, including MCP and AGENTS.md.
The MCP (Model Context Protocol) was initially released by Anthropic last year. In just over a year, there are now more than 10,000 published MCP servers. Even Microsoft is beginning to position AI agents as first-class components of Windows by integrating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and an on-device registry directly into the operating system. MCP is also now generally available in Visual Studio, allowing developers to connect AI agents to external tools, services, and workflows through standardized MCP servers, which simplifies interoperability and automation.
Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, shared the following regarding MCP joining the AAIF:
“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.”
Block"s Goose is an open-source, “on-machine” AI agent framework, that can run locally on a user’s machine rather than requiring cloud-only execution. Goose uses the Model Context Protocol as a core part of its architecture.
AGENTS.md was released by OpenAI in August 2025. Since then, it has become a universal standard for AI coding agents and it has been adopted by more than 60,000 open source projects including VS Code. AGENTS.md is a simple, open-format Markdown file meant to guide AI coding agents rather than human developers. It serves as a “README for agents” by providing structured, machine-readable instructions about a project’s build steps, testing procedures, code-style guidelines, workflows, security considerations, and other context that helps AI agents work effectively within a codebase.
Nick Cooper, Member of the Technical Staff at OpenAI, commented on AGENTS.md joining the AAIF:
“For AI agents to reach their full potential, developers and enterprises need trustworthy infrastructure and accessible tools to build on. By co-founding the AAIF and donating AGENTS.md, we are helping establish open, transparent practices that make AI agent development more predictable, interoperable, and safe.”
You can learn more about AAIF here.