What Is the Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AAIF)?

The future of artificial intelligence is rapidly shifting from simple conversational assistants to autonomous, collaborative AI agents capable of making decisions, executing tasks, and coordinating across systems. As this new era of agentic AI accelerates, industry leaders have recognized the need for shared standards, transparent governance, and open collaboration. Enter the Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AAIF): a massive new foundation announced by the Linux Foundation to provide exactly that.

Launched with founding contributions from Anthropic (Model Context Protocol), Block (goose), and OpenAI (AGENTS.md), the AAIF is designed to unify the most influential open-source projects shaping the emerging agentic ecosystem. With its neutral governance model and emphasis on accessibility, the AAIF aims to ensure that the next generation of AI infrastructure remains open, interoperable, and community-driven.

In this article, we’ll break down what the AAIF is, why it matters, and how its inaugural projects—MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md—are defining the future of AI agents.

What Is the AAIF?

The Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AAIF) is a new open-source foundation under the Linux Foundation dedicated to supporting, standardizing, and advancing agentic AI technologies. This category of AI focuses on agents that can take action, reason about context, collaborate with other agents, and integrate with real-world tools and data.

The AAIF was created to:

• Provide neutral, transparent governance for the core technologies powering agentic AI
• Enable interoperability between tools, models, and platforms by supporting open standards (e.g. AGENTS.md) and shared protocols (e.g. MCP)
• Foster community-driven innovation rather than closed, proprietary ecosystems

Why Agentic AI Needs an Open Foundation

Agentic AI represents one of the most transformative shifts in the AI landscape. Instead of merely responding to queries, autonomous agents can make decisions, execute tasks, and coordinate across multiple systems. These capabilities hold enormous potential across industries—finance, developer tooling, operations, research, and more—but they also create some growing pains:

• Fragmentation: Without shared standards, developers face siloed tools and incompatible protocols. There is also a question of bias if certain protocols are tied to specific foundational models; this could lead to protocol drift in the industry.
• Security & reliability: Agent workflows require predictable behavior and strong safeguards. However, these safeguards also need to be scalable to stable, well-governed infrastructure.
• Transparency: Open-source processes build trust and accelerate innovation.

The AAIF seeks to address all of these challenges by uniting key players and influential technologies under one open umbrella.

The Three Foundational Projects Behind the AAIF

At launch, the AAIF is anchored by three widely adopted open-source technologies that already underpin much of today’s agentic AI development.

1. Model Context Protocol (MCP) – Anthropic

Released only a year ago, Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become a universal standard for connecting AI models to tools, data sources, and applications. MCP simplifies how AI systems access context and perform actions, offering (i) a unified way to integrate with external APIs, (ii) strong security and permission controls, and (iii) fast, flexible deployment across platforms.

Adoption has been explosive. Thousands of MCP servers now exist across industries, supporting everything from developer environments to Fortune 500 workflows. MCP is already integrated into leading AI platforms including Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and VS Code.

2. goose – Block

goose, developed by Block (the company behind Square), is an open-source, local-first framework for building AI agents that are reliable, extensible, and secure.

3. AGENTS.md – OpenAI

AGENTS.md is a simple but popular standard from OpenAI: a markdown file that provides AI coding agents with project-specific guidance. This standard dramatically increases predictability and consistency across different codebases, tools, and build systems at smaller organizations and open-source systems.

What is the expected impact of the AAIF? 

Because AAIF is an entirely neutral organization, popular standards like MCP and AGENTS.md can gain widespread community adoption, including from holdouts that had reservations about a corporate OSS project. The AAIF also ensures that MCP's development remains unbiased and isn't directly affected by specific design choices that Anthropic might make on its foundational models like Claude. It also signals that MCP will be here to stay, encourages more community support and contributions.

Conclusion

The creation of the Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI. By bringing together influential projects like MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md under open governance, the AAIF sets the stage for a future where AI agents are interoperable, predictable, secure, and open to all. As an enterprise-first agent orchestration platform, we’re excited for the future of the AAIF and MCP.