Major AI Labs Unite: Anthropic Donates Model Context Protocol to Linux Foundation's New Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic has donated its Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the newly established Agentic AI Foundation (AIF), a directed fund operating under the Linux Foundation. This strategic move signals a concerted effort among leading AI developers to prioritize open standards within the rapidly evolving agentic AI ecosystem. The AIF is co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with significant support from industry powerhouses including Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. Its core mission is to ensure the transparent, collaborative, and public interest-driven evolution of agentic AI capabilities. Alongside MCP, Block’s Goose and OpenAI’s Agents MD are also designated as founding projects within the AIF, reinforcing the foundation’s commitment to fostering innovation and maintaining neutrality for these foundational technologies.

Introduced by Anthropic approximately a year ago, MCP has achieved considerable adoption as a universal open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems, with over 10,000 active public servers and integration into major AI products like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini. Despite its widespread use, the protocol’s implementation has presented challenges related to deployment complexity and authentication mechanisms. The donation to the Linux Foundation, recognized for its expertise in stewarding critical open-source projects such as the Linux kernel and PyTorch, is viewed as a pivotal step to address these concerns. This transition is expected to provide MCP with a robust, vendor-neutral governance model, safeguarding the standard from potential fragmentation or proprietary enclosure—a risk highlighted by past open-source licensing changes within the industry. This initiative aligns with a broader industry push for interoperable, secure, and portable agent systems, aiming to prevent the nascent agentic AI landscape from diverging into incompatible silos.