Agentic AI Foundation
In plain wordsA nonprofit group under the Linux Foundation that looks after shared, open technical standards for AI agents, such as the Model Context Protocol, so that no single company controls them.
A directed fund of the Linux Foundation that provides vendor-neutral governance, funding and community infrastructure for open-source projects and standards used to build AI agentsAI agent, n.: An AI system that does not just answer but acts: given a goal, it decides on steps, uses tools such as a browser or code editor, checks the results and keeps going until the job is done.. Its founding projects were the Model Context ProtocolModel Context Protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI assistants plug into outside apps and data — files, calendars, databases, business software — through one common connector instead of a custom link for every pairing; often likened to a USB-C port for AI. (contributed by Anthropic), goose (an open-source agent contributed by Block) and AGENTS.md (an agent instruction fileagent instruction file, n.: A plain-text file kept in a software project that tells AI coding agents how the project works — how to build and test it, which conventions to follow, what to avoid — read at the start of every session. convention contributed by OpenAI); later projects include the Agent2Agent protocolAgent2Agent protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies find each other, say what they can do and work together on tasks, much as email lets different mail systems exchange messages., which joined as a hosted project in August 2026. Founding platinum members were Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. The foundation hosts specification work and maintainer governance and runs events such as MCP Dev Summits and the AGNTCon + MCPCon conferences; its creation marked the consolidation of rival agent-interoperability efforts under a neutral home.
Since MCP moved to the Agentic AI Foundation, specification changes go through its public working groups.
Origin
Announced by the Linux Foundation in San Francisco on 9 December 2025, roughly a year after MCP's release, with Anthropic, Block and OpenAI contributing the three founding projects. As of October 2026 its members page listed more than 250 organizations.
Related
- Model Context ProtocolModel Context Protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI assistants plug into outside apps and data — files, calendars, databases, business software — through one common connector instead of a custom link for every pairing; often likened to a USB-C port for AI.
- Agent2Agent protocolAgent2Agent protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies find each other, say what they can do and work together on tasks, much as email lets different mail systems exchange messages.
- agent instruction fileagent instruction file, n.: A plain-text file kept in a software project that tells AI coding agents how the project works — how to build and test it, which conventions to follow, what to avoid — read at the start of every session.
- open-source AIopen-source AI, n.: AI released, ideally with its code and details of its training data and not just the finished model, so that anyone may use, inspect, alter, share and even rebuild it. How open is open enough is debated.
- AI governanceAI governance, n.: The rules, institutions and habits that shape how AI is built and used — from laws and treaties to technical standards and a company's own review processes.
Sources
- Linux Foundation (2025). Linux Foundation Announces the Formation of the Agentic AI Foundation. Press release, 9 December 2025. linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formation-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation
- Agentic AI Foundation (2026). A2A joins AAIF's open agentic stack. AAIF blog, 17 August 2026. aaif.io/blog/a2a-joins-aaif
Mentioned in
Model Context ProtocolModel Context Protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI assistants plug into outside apps and data — files, calendars, databases, business software — through one common connector instead of a custom link for every pairing; often likened to a USB-C port for AI., agent instruction fileagent instruction file, n.: A plain-text file kept in a software project that tells AI coding agents how the project works — how to build and test it, which conventions to follow, what to avoid — read at the start of every session., Agent2Agent protocolAgent2Agent protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies find each other, say what they can do and work together on tasks, much as email lets different mail systems exchange messages., MCP serverMCP server, n.: A small program that makes some service — say a database, a calendar or a company's internal tools — available to any AI assistant that speaks the Model Context Protocol.