A shared home for agent infrastructure
The Agentic AI Foundation, or AAIF, supports protocols and open-source projects used by AI agents. It operates under the Linux Foundation, bringing projects and contributors from competing companies into a common institutional setting. Its scope includes both the interfaces agents use and software that implements them. [3]
AAIF formed on December 9, 2025 with three founding contributions: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md. MCP connects models to tools and data, goose is an agent framework, and AGENTS.md provides repository instructions for coding agents. They are complementary artifacts with different purposes. [1]
A fund and a set of technical projects
The charter amended in July 2026 defines AAIF as a directed fund. Its governing board manages the money raised to support approved projects, while the governance of each technical project is set by that project's own charter. The fund operates with guidance from its board and the Linux Foundation. [2]
That structure separates decisions about budgets and membership from each project's technical governance. A contributing company can participate in a shared foundation without the charter making all the other members owners of its software. The fund's charter is therefore useful evidence about how support is organized, alongside the individual project charters that govern development. [2]
Why the institutional move matters
The founding contributions put an agent protocol, a framework and an instruction format into a shared home rather than leaving collaboration organized solely through their original vendors. That gives the event a place in AI history alongside model releases: it concerns how the surrounding software is maintained and supported. The formation announcement establishes the contributions and intended common governance; it does not prove that every agent implements those interfaces compatibly. [1]
AAIF's current overview also lists Agent2Agent and agentgateway. These belong to its later scope and should be distinguished from the three projects present at formation. Readers tracing a particular protocol need both the foundation's history and that protocol's own technical record. [3]
Sources
- 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
Agentic AI Foundation · Dec 9, 2025
- The Agentic AI Foundation Charter
Agentic AI Foundation · Jul 29, 2026
- About
Agentic AI Foundation · retrieved Oct 23, 2026