Anthropic, Block and OpenAI have contributed their technologies and emerging standards to connect AI agents to the Agentic AI Foundation, a project under The Linux Foundation.
The move highlights how one of the biggest issues with deploying AI agents is connecting and governing them. Anthropic, Block and OpenAI contributed Model Context Protocol (MCP), goose and Agents.md, respectively.
MCP is the best known standard to connect AI models to tools, data and applications, but goose, a local-first AI agent framework, and Agents.md, a coding agent standard, will also be key to connecting agents.
The goal of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is to provide a "a neutral, open foundation to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently and collaboratively."
At first glance, AAIF has most of the big AI agent players lined up. Platinum members include Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.
AAIF is launching about a year after Anthropic released MCP, which has become a key standard. Multiple technology vendors have released MCP servers.
The AAIF noted that it has multiple members including Cisco, Datadog, Docker, IBM, Okta, Oracle, Salesforce, Snowflake and a host of others.
