How Linux Foundation Unifies Open Standards for AI Agents

Agentic AI, the big, bold tool that has quickly become part of the modern developer toolkit, draws strength from its ability to operate external platforms, tools and systems. 

To do so safely, securely and efficiently across a wide array of platforms require all agentic AI tools to play by the same rules. 

It is precisely in order to develop those rules and to ensure critical capability evolves openly, that AI leaders came together to launch the Agentic AI Foundation, under the Linux Foundation umbrella.  

“The technology that will define the next decade, that promises to be the biggest engine of economic growth since the Internet, 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,” says Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block. 

“By establishing the AAIF, Block and this group of industry leaders are taking a stand for openness.”

What is the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)?

Co-founded by AI giants OpenAI, Anthropic & Block, under the Linux foundation, the AAIF promises to steward open, interoperable AI infrastructure for building agentic systems.

Launched with the support of AWS, Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg and Cloudflare, among other big names, AIIF aims to prevent ecosystem fragmentation as AI agents go into production on a massive scale.

AIIF will provide a framework for AI agents to evolve transparently in the public interest, through shared investment, open development and community-led standards.

Having an open and transparent base for the development of AI agents also ensures that no single company controls the direction of foundational Agentic AI infrastructure. 

MCP, Goose and AGENTS.md: The open standards powering AI agent interoperability

The inaugural projects of the Open AI foundation includes AGENTS.md from OpenAI, Model Context Protocol (MCP) from Anthropic and Goose from Block. 

“Within just one year, MCP, AGENTS.md and goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies,” says Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. 

“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.”

Anthropic’s MCP: The model context protocol driving agentic AI collaboration

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), launched just a year ago, has evolved into becoming the universal standard for connecting AI models to external tools. 

Adopted by Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, VS Code and ChatGPT as well as having over 10,000 published servers, Anthropic’s MCP started as an internal project to solve integration problems faced by their teams. 

“When we open sourced it in November 2024, we hoped other developers would find it as useful as we did,” says Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic. 

“A year later, it's become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools, used by developers building with the most popular agentic coding tools and enterprises deploying on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. 

“Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation as part of the AAIF ensures it stays open, neutral and community-driven as it becomes critical infrastructure for AI.”

Why OpenAI donates AGENTS.md for AI agents

AGENTS.md is a lightweight Markdown file, that gives AI coding agents a simple, predictable, interoperable standard to reliably operate across repositories and tools. 

This file, initially developed as an internal solution within OpenAI to make agents behave in a predictable fashion when interacting with other interfaces, has seen rapid adoption with over 600,000 open source projects using it. 

“OpenAI has long believed that shared, community-driven protocols are essential to a healthy agentic ecosystem, which is why we’ve open sourced key building blocks like the Codex CLI, the Agents SDK and now AGENTS.md,” says Nick Cooper Member of the Technical Staff at OpenAI.

Goose: Local-first Al agent framework for trusted agentic workflows

Goose is an open-source, local-first, agentic AI framework developed by Block that combines language models, extensible tools and MCP based integration, to offer a trusted environment for developing agentic AI workflows. 

Released early in 2025, Goose provides practical infrastructure for safe and consistent agentic AI development. 

“Establishing the AAIF and contributing Goose to it ensures that agentic AI remains shaped by the community and driven by merit,” says Manik.

“Together, we're building the infrastructure for an AI future that benefits everyone.”