Anthropic has transferred ownership of its Model Context Protocol to the newly established Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. The foundation was co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with additional support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg.
The Model Context Protocol serves as a universal standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. Anthropic introduced the protocol one year ago as an open standard. Since then, the protocol has gained significant traction across the industry, with more than 10,000 active public servers now in operation.
Major AI products have integrated the protocol into their platforms. ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code now support the standard. Enterprise infrastructure providers including AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure offer deployment support for the protocol.
The protocol’s software development kits record 97 million monthly downloads across Python and TypeScript. A community-driven registry now exists for discovering available servers. The November 25th specification release added features including asynchronous operations, statelessness, and server identity.
Anthropic’s donation includes the transfer of governance to the Linux Foundation while maintaining the existing governance model. The project maintainers will continue their current approach to community input and decision-making. Claude now features a directory with over 75 connectors powered by the protocol.
The Agentic AI Foundation brings together three founding projects. Alongside Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, Block contributes Goose, a framework for building agents, and OpenAI transfers Agents.md, which allows programs and websites to specify rules for coding agents. All three technologies were previously available as free-to-use tools.
Nick Cooper, who leads work on the protocol at OpenAI, states that making the protocol an open standard should encourage broader adoption. According to Cooper, the open interoperability means companies can communicate across providers and agentic systems.
The Linux Foundation provides neutral stewardship for open source projects and has managed critical projects including the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch. The foundation offers legal and technological support for open source development.
Manik Surtani, head of open source at Block, explains that donating Goose to the foundation makes it easier for developers to contribute to the code base and build on top of it. Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B applications at OpenAI, emphasizes that open source will play a significant role in how AI is shaped and adopted.
The foundation aims to ensure that agentic AI develops transparently and collaboratively through strategic investment, community building, and shared development of open standards. The three founding companies believe that open standards will remove barriers to deployment of agentic AI across the economy.
