Why This Matters
For the first time, competing AI giants are collaborating on infrastructure. This is the AI equivalent of browser vendors agreeing on web standards - it signals that AI agents are maturing from experiments to production-ready systems that need interoperability.
The Big Picture: As AI agents move from research into widespread deployment, they need to communicate, collaborate, and integrate across different platforms. Without standards, we'd end up with fragmented, incompatible agent ecosystems.
The Three Core Contributions
Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Donated to the Linux Foundation on December 9, 2025, MCP provides a standardized way for AI models to interact with external tools, data sources, and services.
- Unified protocol for tool calling and context management
- Already adopted by Claude, Docker, and many IDE integrations
- Enables AI models to access external data securely
OpenAI's AGENTS.md
A specification for describing agent capabilities, behaviors, and interfaces in a standardized, human-readable format.
- Markdown-based specification for agent documentation
- Defines agent capabilities, constraints, and interfaces
- Makes it easy to understand what an agent can and cannot do
Block's goose Framework
An open-source framework for building autonomous AI agents that can execute real-world tasks.
- Moves beyond suggestions to actual execution
- True autonomy for task completion
- Trending on GitHub with strong developer adoption
Foundation Members
Co-Founders
Members
What This Means for Developers
- Cross-Platform Agents: Build once, run across Claude, GPT, Gemini, and more
- Standardized Tool Calling: MCP becomes the universal protocol for AI-tool integration
- Agent Documentation: AGENTS.md provides a standard way to describe agent capabilities
- Open Source First: All contributions are open source under Linux Foundation governance
- Enterprise Ready: Standards make it easier to adopt AI agents in production environments
Historical Parallel: The Web Standards Era
This collaboration echoes the early days of the web when browser vendors (Microsoft, Netscape, Mozilla) eventually collaborated on W3C standards. That standardization enabled the modern web as we know it.
The Agentic AI Foundation could play a similar role for AI agents - creating the shared infrastructure that allows a diverse ecosystem of agents to emerge and interoperate.
Key Dates
Anthropic donates Model Context Protocol to Linux Foundation
OpenAI and Anthropic co-found Agentic AI Foundation alongside Block
Google, Microsoft, and AWS join as foundation members
