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Agentic AI Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s home, since December 2025, for shared agent standards and tools: the Model Context Protocol, goose, AGENTS.md, A2A and six more projects.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux Foundation1 impactWebsite

What it is

The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is a directed fund of the Linux Foundation, announced in San Francisco on December 9, 2025. It started with three projects from companies that compete with each other: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose agent and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md format. AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI were its Platinum members at launch, among 49 members in all. By October 22, 2026 it hosted 10 projects, and on October 28 its members page listed 287 organisations: 8 Platinum, 48 Gold, 187 Silver and 44 Associate.

For someone choosing a technology, an AAIF badge means the project’s trademarks and other assets have moved from the company that started it to the Linux Foundation, the project has adopted an LF technical charter, and it is released under an OSI-approved permissive licence or as an open specification. Admission takes a majority vote of the Technical Committee and then one of the Governing Board, where the large AI vendors sit. The stage says how far a project has come: sandbox for early ones, growth for those with production users at two or more unaffiliated organisations, impact for widely deployed ones.

It is mostly a home for interfaces that many vendors implement rather than for products: protocols and formats such as MCP, A2A, AGENTS.md, Agent Skills and Open Responses, beside a few implementations such as goose, two gateways and a sandbox. Some overlap: agentgateway and Agent Router both route traffic between applications, models and MCP tools. Training and inference projects, such as vLLM and Ray, sit in a different Linux Foundation sub-foundation, the PyTorch Foundation.

Its projects in this catalog

In depth

Sandbox, growth, impact and emeritus#

From the Project Lifecycle Policy, first written on March 18, 2026 and last updated on October 15, 2026. New projects may enter at sandbox, growth or impact, and every project is reviewed once a year.

Sandbox

entry level

For projects that are technically viable but lack the adoption for growth. They need an OSI-approved permissive licence, a working implementation, at least one active maintainer and a one- or two-page thesis on who would use the project. They get CI and infrastructure, but no mentorship, funding, marketing or security scanning, and every sandbox README must say the status is not an endorsement. A TC sponsor checks in after six months; a project that hasn’t applied for growth within 12 months faces an archiving discussion.

Growth

agentgateway, A2A, Agent Router

A project needs a TC sponsor, a growth plan showing how it will get diverse maintainers, documented production use by at least two unaffiliated organisations and a steady flow of merged contributions. Growth projects get mentorship from the TC and, if the Governing Board approves, foundation resources. The TC reviews their progress every quarter and expects them to leave the stage within two years.

Impact

MCP, goose, AGENTS.md

The growth criteria plus significant industry adoption, maintainers from several organisations on the project’s governing body, a public roadmap and release process, committers from at least two organisations, and a written process for changing governance and becoming a maintainer. Impact projects report to the TC every quarter and can get ongoing money for CI, documentation contractors, security audits and travel.

Emeritus

end of life

For projects that have few or no releases or commits, or whose maintainers have left. The README must say so and point to any recommended alternative; the foundation keeps the trademarks and domains, but the project draws no resources. Moving a project here takes a TC majority and Governing Board approval.

The 10 projects#

Stages are from the Technical Committee’s list in October 2026, which didn’t yet give stages for the four projects added on October 22.

ProjectJoinedContributed byStageWhat it is
Model Context Protocol (MCP)December 9, 2025AnthropicImpactA protocol that connects AI applications to tools and data; more than 10,000 published servers at launch
gooseDecember 9, 2025BlockImpactAn open-source, local-first AI agent that works with any LLM
AGENTS.mdDecember 9, 2025OpenAIImpactA file of instructions for coding agents, used by more than 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks at launch
agentgatewayJune 2026Its maintainers; at the Linux Foundation since 2025GrowthA gateway for traffic between agents, models, tools and APIs
Agent2Agent (A2A)August 17, 2026Google; at the Linux Foundation since 2025GrowthA protocol for agents to find each other and hand off tasks; version 1.0 in March 2026
Agent RouterSeptember 10, 2026The Envoy project, as Envoy AI GatewayGrowthAn AI gateway built on Envoy that routes applications to models and MCP tools
Agent SkillsOctober 22, 2026AnthropicNot yet listedAn open format for packaging reusable agent capabilities
Open ResponsesOctober 22, 2026OpenAINot yet listedAn open specification for LLM interfaces across providers, based on the OpenAI Responses API
OpenEnvOctober 22, 2026Hugging FaceNot yet listedA framework for interoperable reinforcement-learning environments to train and evaluate agents
OpenSandboxOctober 22, 2026AlibabaNot yet listedA general-purpose sandbox platform for AI applications

Who decides#

Money and the final say on admissions sit with the Governing Board. Each Platinum member, at $350,000 a year, gets a seat; Gold members, at $200,000, nominate candidates for a shared Gold seat; Silver dues depend on headcount. In October 2026 the board was chaired by David Nalley of AWS, Shopify held the Gold seat, and Platinum membership was listed as not available to new members.

The Technical Committee (TC) reviews proposals, applies the lifecycle policy and moves projects between stages. Its charter, adopted on March 3, 2026, gives each Platinum member one representative; the eight members were appointed by the Governing Board for a term ending December 31, 2026, with David Soria Parra of Anthropic as chair and Caitie McCaffrey of Microsoft as co-chair. It aims for consensus and can decide by lazy consensus: a proposal passes unless a member objects within seven days.

Proposals arrive as GitHub issues in aaif/project-proposals. Under version 0.3 of the process, in effect since August 28, 2026, an automated intake agent checks each submission and the foundation’s CTO screens it, then a written question-and-answer period runs on the issue, in which a minimum number of TC members must take part before the TC votes. The Governing Board votes next, weighing the resources the project will need, and LF Legal then handles the contribution agreement, technical charter and trademark transfer.

Where it came from2024–2026

Anthropic open-sourced MCP in November 2024, Block released goose in early 2025, and OpenAI published AGENTS.md in August 2025. All three spread quickly: by December 2025 there were more than 10,000 published MCP servers, and AGENTS.md was used by more than 60,000 open-source projects and agent frameworks. On December 9, 2025 the Linux Foundation put the three into a new directed fund, the Agentic AI Foundation, with the donors and their rivals Google and Microsoft among its eight Platinum members.

Through 2026 the foundation wrote its rules and took in projects from outside its founders. The Technical Committee’s charter was adopted on March 3 and the project lifecycle policy written on March 18. agentgateway joined in June as the fourth project, Google’s A2A in August, and Envoy AI Gateway, renamed Agent Router, in September.

At AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose on October 22, 2026, it added Agent Skills from Anthropic, Open Responses from OpenAI, OpenEnv from Hugging Face and OpenSandbox from Alibaba, taking it from three projects to 10 in its first year.

Why it’s built this way

Launch with projects from rivals
Starting with standards from Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, and with Google and Microsoft as Platinum members, gave agent protocols a neutral home that none of the competing model vendors controls.
Standards as well as code
Most of its projects are interfaces many vendors implement, such as MCP, A2A, AGENTS.md and Open Responses, so the proposal process accepts an open specification as well as code under an OSI-approved permissive licence.
Two votes to get in
The Technical Committee judges whether a project fits and which stage it belongs in, while the Governing Board confirms that the foundation is ready to take it on and can pay for what it needs.
Engagement instead of a single champion
With many submissions and a committee spread across time zones, the August 2026 process runs mostly offline and requires several TC members to engage with each proposal, to surface concerns earlier than one sponsor would.

Timeline

  1. 2024

    Anthropic open-sources the Model Context Protocol in November

  2. 2025

    OpenAI publishes AGENTS.md in August; AAIF formed on December 9 with MCP, goose and AGENTS.md

  3. 2026

    Technical Committee charter adopted in March; agentgateway joins in June, A2A in August, Agent Router in September

  4. 2026

    Agent Skills, Open Responses, OpenEnv and OpenSandbox join on October 22, making 10 projects

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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