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Linux Foundation Unites Major Tech Firms to Launch Agentic AI Foundation

• By Chris Paoli
• December 09, 2025

The Linux Foundation today announced the creation of a new collaborative initiative — the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) — bringing together major AI and cloud players such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and other major tech companies to build a shared open‑source ecosystem for autonomous AI agents.

 
The foundation gets underway with three foundational projects: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s Goose agent framework for agentic workflow building and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, which have been used across approximately 40,000 open-source projects. Other members involved on a platinum tier basis include Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Block, Google, along with Microsoft and OpenAI. Lower-tier members feature Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and several other organizations.

"We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together," said 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 Model Context Protocol has rapidly become a standard for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications since its release one year ago. The protocol has been integrated into Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT and other platforms. Microsoft announced support for MCP in Windows 11 at its Build conference earlier this year, with plans to enforce security-by-default measures for MCP servers listed in the Windows registry.

"MCP started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing," said 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."

Block contributed its Goose framework, an open-source, local-first AI agent framework that combines language models with extensible tools and standardized MCP-based integration. The company released Goose in early 2025 to provide structured infrastructure for building and executing agentic workflows.

OpenAI's AGENTS.md provides a standardized format for giving AI coding agents project-specific guidance across different repositories and toolchains. Released in August, the markdown-based convention has been adopted by more than 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks including GitHub Copilot, Cursor and others.

The foundation will operate under the Linux Foundation's governance model, which has previously served projects including Kubernetes and PyTorch. Microsoft executive Chris DiBona emphasized the industry's commitment to collaborative development.

"For the agentic future to become a reality, we have to build it together, and we have to build it in the open," said DiBona, vice president in Microsoft's Office of the Chief Technology Officer. "The AAIF will give industry and developers a shared and transparent path to evolve the agentic AI ecosystem."