The Linux Foundation Launches the Agentic AI Foundation—MCP Finds Its Permanent Home

On December 9th 2025, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic Artificial Intelligence Foundation (AAIF), bringing together three foundational projects under open governance: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md.

WorkOS is proud to be a founding Silver member of the AAIF.

Why This Matters

MCP has gone from internal Anthropic project to universal standard in just one year. Over 10,000 published MCP servers now exist, with adoption across Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, VS Code, and ChatGPT.

Moving MCP to a neutral foundation ensures the protocol remains open, community-driven, and vendor-agnostic as it becomes critical infrastructure.

The founding contributions tell the story of where agentic AI is heading: MCP provides the connection layer between AI and tools, goose offers a local-first agent framework, and AGENTS.md gives coding agents consistent project-specific guidance. Together, they form the building blocks for interoperable AI systems.

The Industry Is Aligning

The membership roster signals just how seriously the industry is taking agentic infrastructure. Platinum members include AWS, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft.

Gold members span developer tooling companies like JetBrains, Docker, and Datadog. When competitors join the same foundation, it's because they recognize the underlying standards need to be shared.

This pattern mirrors what happened with containers and Kubernetes—competing interests realized that fighting over the infrastructure layer slowed everyone down. The same logic applies to agentic AI. Enterprises won't build on protocols controlled by a single vendor, and developers won't invest in ecosystems that might fragment.

What This Means for the Future

Interoperability Becomes the Default

With MCP, goose, and AGENTS.md under shared governance, developers can expect these projects to evolve together rather than in isolation. An agent built with goose can leverage MCP servers and follow AGENTS.md conventions without vendor lock-in. This kind of interoperability has historically required years of standards committee work—the AAIF is attempting to establish it from day one.

Enterprise Confidence Increases

Regulated industries have been cautious about agentic AI adoption. Bloomberg's involvement is telling: their CTO explicitly called out the need to extend MCP "securely and in compliance with the requirements of regulated financial services environments." Open governance gives enterprises the assurance that critical infrastructure won't disappear or pivot based on a single company's priorities.

The Agent Ecosystem Matures

AGENTS.md adoption—already at 60,000+ open source projects—hints at how quickly conventions can spread when they solve real problems. As Mike Krieger from Anthropic put it, MCP "started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing." The best infrastructure emerges from practitioners scratching their own itches, then opening it up for others.

Security and Trust Move to the Forefront

Autonomous agents operating across systems create new security surface area. Having these foundational projects under Linux Foundation governance means security considerations can be addressed collaboratively rather than piecemeal. Expect more focus on authentication, authorization, and audit trails as the AAIF matures.

WorkOS and the Agentic Ecosystem

We've been deep in the MCP ecosystem since its early days—tonight we're hosting MCP Night 3.0 to celebrate this announcement alongside the developer community.

As authentication infrastructure for companies building with AI (including several AAIF members), we see firsthand how these open standards accelerate development.

The shift from conversational AI to autonomous agents that coordinate across systems is underway.

Open governance through the AAIF helps ensure that shift happens transparently—and that the security and identity layers these agents need are built on solid foundations.

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