OpenAI, Anthropic, Block launch Agentic AI Foundation under Linux

OpenAI said it has co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, together with Anthropic and Block, with backing from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg and Cloudflare.

The new body will steward open, interoperable standards for AI agents as they move from pilots to production, according to the company.

The Agentic AI Foundation, or AAIF, will provide neutral governance for shared specifications, software and reference implementations that let agents talk to tools and to one another across products and clouds.

OpenAI said the goal is to reduce fragmentation, make agents safer and more portable, and ensure no single vendor controls the core protocols.

The three founding projects

• AGENTS.md by OpenAI, a lightweight markdown format for project‑specific instructions that helps coding and workflow agents behave predictably across repositories and build systems. Since its August 2025 release, it has been adopted by more than 60,000 open‑source projects and agent frameworks, as per the company.

• Model Context Protocol, or MCP, from Anthropic, a universal standard for connecting AI systems to external data and tools. Anthropic said MCP now powers more than 10,000 public servers and is supported in products such as ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Visual Studio Code.

• goose from Block, an open‑source, local‑first agent framework that combines language models, extensible tools and MCP‑based integrations to build reliable, auditable agentic workflows, as per project notes.

How will the standards work together?

In practice, AGENTS.md gives an agent a consistent briefing for each codebase or project, MCP provides a common way to fetch data and call tools securely, and goose offers a production‑grade framework to orchestrate those tasks.

Together, they aim to let teams mix models, tools and runtimes without being locked into a single provider, industry observers said.

AAIF operates as a directed fund within the Linux Foundation, the non‑profit that also stewards projects such as the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js and PyTorch.

Platinum members include Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

What comes next

The foundation will evolve the three seed projects in the open, accept new contributions and encourage cross‑vendor implementations and conformance tests, as per announcements.

The Linux Foundation has also incubated adjacent efforts on agent interoperability in 2025, signalling growing momentum for shared protocols across the stack, industry reports indicate.