Linux Foundation Says New Organization Brings Open Governance to Agentic AI

The Linux Foundation has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), saying the new organization aims to help ensure agentic artificial intelligence (AI) evolves transparently and collaboratively.

The AAIF is a neutral, open foundation, the Linux Foundation said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) press release.

“We are seeing AI enter a new phase, as conversational systems shift to autonomous agents that can work together,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said in the release.

The AAIF is supported in its mission by the contributions of three technical projects: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a universal standard protocol for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications; Block’s goose, which is an open source, local-first AI agent framework; and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md, which is a universal standard that gives AI coding agents a consistent source of project-specific guidance, according to the release.

“Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides,” Zemlin said in the release. “The Linux Foundation is proud to serve as the neutral home where they will continue to build AI infrastructure the world will rely on.”

Together with Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, other “platinum members” of the AAIF include Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google and Microsoft, per the release.

PYMNTS reported in October that the Linux Foundation has found that 94% of surveyed organizations are using generative AI and 41% of the infrastructure supporting these initiatives is open source.

The Linux Foundation has said that “openness drives progress, fostering an ecosystem that enables collaboration, innovation and responsible adoption of transformative technologies like generative AI.”

MCP is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 to make AI systems more useful in real-world business settings, PYMNTS reported in November.

At its core, MCP allows AI models such as Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini to securely connect to business tools, databases and workflows, providing a foundational integration layer that allows AI to move beyond generating passive insights and become an active enterprise agent that retrieves live operational data, updates records and performs actions within approved systems.

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