The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is a foundation under the Linux Foundation that hosts open protocols and open-source projects for agentic AI. The Linux Foundation announced its formation on December 9, 2025, with three founding project contributions: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose agent framework, and OpenAI's AGENTS.md convention (Source: linuxfoundation.org). Anthropic describes the foundation as one it co-founded with Block and OpenAI (Source: anthropic.com). As of October 2026 the foundation lists MCP, goose, AGENTS.md, Agent2Agent (A2A) and agentgateway as hosted projects (Source: aaif.io), and Anthropic donated its Agent Skills standard to it on October 22, 2026.
Projects
| Project | Contributed by | Function (as described by the project or contributor) | Joined AAIF |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) | Anthropic | Standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications | December 2025 (founding) |
| goose | Block | Open-source, local-first AI agent framework with MCP-based integration | December 2025 (founding) |
| AGENTS.md | OpenAI | Markdown convention giving coding agents project-specific guidance across repositories; released by OpenAI in August 2025 | December 2025 (founding) |
| Agent2Agent (A2A) | Google (via the Linux Foundation) | Standard for how agents discover each other, delegate tasks and exchange work | August 17, 2026 |
| agentgateway | — | Proxy for mediating and controlling agent traffic | by August 2026 |
| Agent Skills | Anthropic | Folder-based format built around a SKILL.md file that packages task instructions, scripts and reference material for agents | October 22, 2026 |
Sources for the table: the Linux Foundation formation announcement for the three founding projects (Source: linuxfoundation.org); the AAIF announcement and Forbes coverage for A2A and agentgateway (Source: aaif.io; Source: forbes.com); Anthropic's announcement for Agent Skills (Source: anthropic.com).
A2A. Google had earlier donated A2A to the Linux Foundation, and Forbes described the August 2026 move into AAIF as clarifying where the project is hosted rather than who controls it. IBM merged its Agent Communication Protocol into A2A in August 2025; Forbes noted that Cisco's AGNTCY still covers overlapping ground in agent discovery and identity (Source: forbes.com). AAIF said A2A is backed by more than 150 organizations (Source: aaif.io).
Agent Skills. Anthropic developed skills while working on Claude Code, launched them in October 2025 and published Agent Skills as an open standard in December 2025. At the time of the donation it said more than 70 agent platforms, including ChatGPT, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and VS Code, had integrated the standard, and that 1 million skills had been published and nearly 280 million installed (figures reported by Anthropic). The donation covers the Agent Skills name and logo, the GitHub organization and the agentskills.io domain; the standard can be used or contributed to without joining AAIF. Engineers from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies maintain it as individuals, with David Soria Parra and Mahesh Murag as lead maintainers, and Anthropic proposed an initial roadmap of versioned releases, a formal proposal process, and security guidance for people who write and install skills (Source: anthropic.com).
Membership
At formation the platinum members were Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Eighteen gold members included Cisco, Datadog, Docker, IBM, JetBrains, Okta, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify and Snowflake, and twenty-three silver members included Hugging Face, Uber and Zapier (Source: linuxfoundation.org). The platinum list on the foundation's site was unchanged as of October 2026 (Source: aaif.io).
Governance
The foundation has a governing board and a technical committee. As listed in October 2026, the board is chaired by David Nalley (AWS), with April Kyle Nassi (Google) as treasurer and members from Microsoft, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Anthropic, Bloomberg and Block, a gold-member representative from Shopify, and a senior adviser from the Gates Foundation. The technical committee is chaired by David Soria Parra of Anthropic, with members from Microsoft, Block and OpenAI (Source: aaif.io). Manik Surtani is the foundation's chief technology officer (Source: aaif.io).
Activities
The foundation runs the MCP Dev Summit, whose events and podcast were donated by member Obot.ai at formation (Source: linuxfoundation.org), and the AGNTCon+MCPCon North America conference, held October 22–23, 2026 in San Jose (Source: aaif.io).
Positions
At formation, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said that bringing the projects under AAIF ensures "they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides." Anthropic said donating MCP "ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven," and OpenAI's Nick Cooper said co-founding the foundation and donating AGENTS.md would help "establish open, transparent practices that make AI agent development more predictable, interoperable, and safe" (Source: linuxfoundation.org).
Relationships
- related: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Skills, Agentic AI
- related: Anthropic, OpenAI, Block (Square / Cash App) (co-founders)
- related: Microsoft, Amazon, Google DeepMind, Cloudflare (platinum members or their parent companies)
- related: International AI Standards, Frontier Model Forum, Open Secure AI Alliance