Open AIAnthropic and Block have co-founded a new open source organization – the Agentic AI Foundation – to advance standards for artificial intelligence agents.
The three companies are also transferring ownership of a number of widely used agentic technologies to the foundation. This includes Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows agents to connect and communicate; OpenAI's Agents.md, which allows programs and websites to specify rules for coding agents; and Goose, a construction agent framework developed by Block. These technologies were already free to use, but the new foundation makes it possible for others to contribute to their development.
“MCP is used by many companies, but there are others [who don’t use it]says Nick Cooper, who leads work on the protocol at OpenAI. Cooper says making MCP an open standard should encourage developers and companies to embrace it and build systems that integrate agentic AI. “That open interoperability – that open standard – really means that companies can talk to different providers and between agentic systems.”
The Agentic AI Foundation is established under the Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of the widely used open source Linux operating system and other projects. The foundation provides legal and technological support for the establishment of open source foundations. Other companies that have joined the AAIF, in addition to the three founding members, include Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg and Cloudflare.
The new foundation reflects an incipient shift from chat-based AI systems to greater use of programs that take actions on behalf of users. This kind of agentic AI promises a potentially lucrative new paradigm in which AI agents use the Internet and negotiate with each other to power all kinds of applications. For example, consumers can use AI assistants to buy and book things, while businesses use AI agents to manage transactions and customer interactions.
Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B applications at OpenAI, envisions a time when large numbers of AI agents routinely interact with each other while conducting business. The AI industry working with the same open standards must ensure that these interactions occur seamlessly. “Open source is going to play a very big role in how AI is shaped and applied in the real world,” says Narayanan.
The issue of openness seems crucial for AI right now. American companies mainly make money by providing access to powerful closed models through application programming interfaces (APIs). Meta previously released the weights for its best model, Llama, so that anyone could download and run it, although the company has recently signaled a shift to a more closed approach. A number of Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Z.ai, offer strong open source models that have become popular with developers, startups and AI researchers. Some worry that this image could ultimately provide Chinese companies with a major strategic advantage.
