OpenAI and Anthropic have donated their AGENTS.md and Model Context Protocol projects to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a new directed fund under the Linux Foundation. Block contributed their agent framework, goose, as another founding project, and several other tech companies have joined as Platinum members.
The aim of the AAIF is to provide a neutral organization to encourage open-source agentic AI technologies and secure long-term community support of projects. Besides the three members contributing founding projects, the foundation’s Platinum members are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, and Google. Dozens of other tech companies have joined as Gold and Silver members. Silver member Obot.ai has donated their MCP Dev Summit events and podcast to AAIF. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation:
We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together. Within just one year, MCP, AGENTS.md and goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies. Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides. The Linux Foundation is proud to serve as the neutral home where they will continue to build AI infrastructure the world will rely on.
InfoQ covered all three of the AAIF founding projects at their release. MCP was released in late 2024 as “an open standard describing a protocol for integrating external resources and tools with LLM apps.” Goose, an “AI agent framework [that] provides users with a flexible, on-machine AI assistant that can be customized through extensions” launched in early 2025, while AGENTS.md, an “open format designed to assist AI coding agents,” was released in the second half of 2025.
Simon Willison, co-creator of Django, wrote about the new foundation on his blog:
Personally, the project I’d like to see most from an initiative like this one is a clear, community-managed specification for the OpenAI Chat Completions JSON API – or a close equivalent. There are dozens of slightly incompatible implementations of that not-quite-specification floating around already, it would be great to have a written spec accompanied by a compliance test suite.
A Hacker News discussion about the donation of MCP quickly produced several comments questioning the long-term viability of the protocol. One user wrote:
It feels far too early for a protocol that’s barely a year old with so much turbulence to be donated into its own foundation under the LF. A lot of people don’t realize this, but the foundations that wrap up to the LF have revenue pipelines that are supported by those foundations events (like Kubecon brings in A LOT of money for the CNCF), courses, certifications, etc…I don’t see how MCP supports that revenue stream nor does it seem like a good idea at this stage…Mature projects like Kubernetes becoming the backbone of a foundation, like it did with CNCF, makes a lot of sense: it was a relatively proven technology at Google that had a lot of practical use cases for the emerging world of “cloud” and containers. MCP, at least for me, has not yet proven its robustness as a mature and stable project….
Others pointed out that Google donated their A2A protocol to the Linux Foundation earlier this year as part of the formation of the Agent2Agent project. Other members of that project include AWS and Microsoft.
