Anthropic says MCP will stay 'open, neutral, and community-driven' after donating project to Linux Foundation

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Anthropic and OpenAI are set to donate projects to the Linux Foundation following the launch of the open source organization’s new Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).

According to the Linux Foundation, the AAIF will act as a “neutral, open foundation” for open source agentic AI projects, providing organizations with an ecosystem of tools, standards, and “community-driven innovation”.

The duo are among the inaugural backers of the new foundation, with other members including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, Google, Block, and Bloomberg.

“The advent of agentic AI represents a new era of autonomous decision making and coordination across AI systems that will transform and revolutionize entire industries,” the foundation said in a statement.

“With founding contributions from Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, the AAIF unites cutting-edge technology and open source governance to shape the future of open and accessible AI.”

Anthropic pledges to keep MCP open source

As part of the launch, Anthropic revealed it will donate the Model Context Protocol (MCP) open standards project. The AI developer initially open sourced MCP in November 2024, but Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic, said this latest move will ensure it stays “open, neutral, and community-driven”.

MCP has quickly become the standard protocol for connecting AI models to the various external tools, applications, and data enterprises use in daily operations.

The protocol has been adopted by Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, Cursor, and a range of other popular AI platforms. To date, more than 10,000 MCP servers are in operation, underpinning projects ranging from basic developer tools to AI deployments at large enterprises.

A key factor behind its popularity lies in the fact it streamlines integration of AI models with tooling, helping boost security controls and faster deployment.

"MCP started as an internal project to solve a problem our own teams were facing,” Krieger explained. “When we open sourced it in November 2024, we hoped other developers would find it as useful as we did.”

“A year later, it's become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools, used by developers building with the most popular agentic coding tools and enterprises deploying on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure,” he added.

“Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation as part of the AAIF ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven as it becomes critical infrastructure for AI.”

OpenAI gets in on the act

Alongside Anthropic, OpenAI has pledged to donate its AGENTS.md tool, which offers an open format for guiding and coordinating coding agents.

“AGENTS.md is a simple, universal standard that gives AI coding agents a consistent source of project-specific guidance needed to operate reliably across different repositories and toolchains,” according to the foundation.

This system works essentially by making agent behavior more predictable across multiple repositories, and has already been adopted by around 60,000 open source projects and agentic frameworks.

Organizations and platforms using this standard include Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Devin, and OpenAI’s own Codex tool.

Nick Cooper, member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said the decision to donate AGENTS.md will facilitate more “open, transparent practices” for AI agent development, improving interoperability and safety.

“OpenAI has long believed that shared, community-driven protocols are essential to a healthy agentic ecosystem, which is why we’ve open sourced key building blocks like the Codex CLI, the Agents SDK, and now AGENTS.md,” he said.

“We’re proud to work alongside our co-founders to advance a more open and trustworthy future for agentic AI.”

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Ross Kelly is ITPro's News & Analysis Editor, responsible for leading the brand's news output and in-depth reporting on the latest stories from across the business technology landscape. Ross was previously a Staff Writer, during which time he developed a keen interest in cyber security, business leadership, and emerging technologies.

He graduated from Edinburgh Napier University in 2016 with a BA (Hons) in Journalism, and joined ITPro in 2022 after four years working in technology conference research.

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