Recognizing the importance of AI Agents, industry stakeholders have decided to establish a Foundation that fosters common open standards and collaboration .

Under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) has been co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare and Bloomberg.

Its aim is to ensure Agentic AI evolves transparently, collaboratively and in the public interest through strategic investment, community building, and shared development of open standards.

That's the official statement; in simple terms that means that it's going to be a vendor-neutral home for open source agentic AI projects that provides funding for community programs, research and building open protocols.

The notion is that only open protocols will allow the seamless collaboration between different Agentic vendors the way open source software does. The other aspect that they try to secure is to prevent the concentration of power resulting from the use of Agentic AI to the hands of a few. So AAIF aims to foster open governance, innovation, sustainability and neutrality.

Following the the launch, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol, Block donated Goose and OpenAI donated AGENTS.md as the founding projects.

While we're all familiar with MCP, not all might be familiar with OpenAI's AGENTS.md:

AGENTS.md is a simple, universal standard that gives AI coding agents a consistent source of project-specific guidance needed to operate reliably across different repositories and toolchains. This markdown-based convention makes agent behavior far more predictable across diverse repositories and build systems.

The other founding project, Goose, is an open source, local-first AI agent framework for automating enginnering tasks developed by Block. We first encountered it when it ran an Advent of GenAI prior to Christmas 2025.

As part of this launch, AAIF member Obot.ai has donated its MCP Dev Summit events and podcast to AAIF.

Announcing the launch of AAIF, Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said

"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."  

More Information

Linux Foundation Announces the Formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)   

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