The establishment of the Agentic AI Foundation, a new project under the Linux Foundation to create open standards for the developing field of autonomous AI systems, was announced today by three of the top AI companies.
Three widely used technologies are being contributed to the foundation by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block: Block’s Goose, an open-source framework for creating AI agents; OpenAI’s AGENTS.md specification, which is used by over 40,000 open-source projects; and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has drawn over 10,000 published servers. Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft are among the foundation’s platinum members.
Industry Gathers Around Standards
As businesses compete to create agentic AI systems—software that can plan, reason, and carry out complex tasks with little human intervention—the announcement was made. MCP “started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing” when it was made publicly available in November 2024, according to Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer. “A year later, it’s become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools,” he stated.
Major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Visual Studio Code have all incorporated the protocol. In August 2025, OpenAI launched AGENTS.md, a markdown-based format that offers project-specific instructions to AI coding agents. Cursor, Google’s Gemini CLI, and GitHub Copilot have all adopted this format.
“As conversational systems transition to autonomous agents that can collaborate, we are witnessing AI enter a new phase,” stated Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Within just one year, MCP, AGENTS.md and goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies.”
Encouragement Of Openness
The argument in the industry about whether AI development should follow open standards or stay proprietary is reflected in the foundation. “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,” stated Manik Surtani, Block’s head of open source.
Making these technologies open standards would promote wider usage, said to Nick Cooper, who is in charge of AGENTS.md development at OpenAI. “This open interoperability—this open standard—essentially allows companies to communicate across different providers and agentic systems,” he stated.
Although there are still issues with security, interoperability, and governance, the foundation is launched as industry use of agentic AI picks up speed.