Iman Soltanzadeh

·Iman Soltanzadeh

MCP joins the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation

Anthropic is donating the Model Context Protocol to the new Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, alongside Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md.

AI agents · Model Context Protocol · Open source · AI notes

Card titled MCP joins the Agentic AI Foundation, 9 December 2025, with three reported figures in a row: over 97 million monthly MCP SDK downloads, over 10,000 active public MCP servers and over 60,000 projects using AGENTS.md.

TL;DR

  • On 9 December 2025, Anthropic announced that it is donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the new Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which Anthropic, Block and OpenAI co-founded as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation.
  • MCP joins Block’s goose and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md as the foundation’s first projects. Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google and Microsoft are platinum members alongside the three co-founders.
  • According to the MCP maintainers, they keep control of its technical direction, while the foundation’s board decides on budget, member recruitment and new projects.

What MCP is

Anthropic released MCP as an open standard on 25 November 2024. It defines one way for AI applications to connect to data sources and tools: an organisation exposes data or tools through an MCP server, and any AI application that acts as an MCP client can use them. The aim was to replace the custom integration that each new data source required.

What was announced

The Linux Foundation formed the AAIF to give agentic AI projects a neutral, open home. Three projects form its starting point:

  • MCP (Anthropic, 2024): a protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications.
  • goose (Block, early 2025): an open-source, local-first framework for building and running AI agents, with integrations based on MCP.
  • AGENTS.md (OpenAI, August 2025): a Markdown convention that gives AI coding agents project-specific guidance across repositories.

The Linux Foundation’s press release named 49 member organisations at launch: 8 platinum, 18 gold and 23 silver.

Timeline from November 2024 to December 2025: Anthropic open-sources MCP on 25 November 2024; Block releases goose in early 2025; OpenAI releases AGENTS.md in August 2025; MCP specification release on 25 November 2025; the Agentic AI Foundation is formed on 9 December 2025 with MCP, goose and AGENTS.md as its founding projects.

From protocol to foundation. Dates as given in Anthropic’s announcements and the Linux Foundation’s press release; member count taken from the press release’s list. Chart drawn for this post.

How governance works

According to the MCP maintainers, little changes for the protocol itself. The governance model introduced earlier in 2025 continues: the maintainers make decisions about the protocol, guided by community input. The foundation’s governing board decides on strategic investments, budget allocation, member recruitment and new projects, while each project keeps full control of its technical direction. The Linux Foundation, which also hosts Kubernetes, PyTorch and Node.js, provides infrastructure; according to the maintainers, it will not dictate MCP’s technical direction.

Reported adoption

These are the organisations’ own figures; I have not checked them independently:

  • more than 97 million monthly downloads of the MCP software development kits for Python and TypeScript;
  • more than 10,000 active public MCP servers;
  • client support in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Visual Studio Code and other products, with deployment support from AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure;
  • more than 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks using AGENTS.md.

Anthropic also points to the specification release of 25 November 2025, which introduced new features including asynchronous operations, statelessness, server identity and official extensions, and to an official, community-driven registry of MCP servers.

My view

For anyone who builds and runs MCP servers, the long-term openness of the protocol matters directly. Neutral governance under a long-standing foundation is a meaningful step towards that, and the fact that three companies co-founded it, rather than one, makes the commitment more credible. In my view, a shared protocol does not by itself settle which tools an agent may use, or with which data; for regulated sectors such as energy, that governance remains each organisation’s own responsibility.

Sources

  • Linux Foundation (9 December 2025). Linux Foundation announces the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), anchored by new project contributions including Model Context Protocol (MCP), goose and AGENTS.md. aaif.io.
  • Anthropic (9 December 2025). Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation. anthropic.com.
  • Soria Parra, D. (9 December 2025). MCP joins the Agentic AI Foundation. Model Context Protocol Blog. blog.modelcontextprotocol.io.
  • Anthropic (25 November 2024). Introducing the Model Context Protocol. anthropic.com.

Figures are as reported in these sources; the member count is taken from the press release’s list. Images are drawn for this post.

The views in this article are my own and do not represent those of my employer or of any organisation I am associated with.