Opening article
Anthropic has donated its Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund co‑founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare and Bloomberg. MCP, an open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems, has grown to include over 75 connectors in Claude, Tool Search and Programmatic Tool Calling features, an official community registry, and SDKs with 97 million monthly downloads. The donation keeps MCP open‑source, community‑driven and vendor‑neutral under the Linux Foundation’s stewardship. The AAIF aims to advance agentic AI transparently and collaboratively through strategic investment and shared development of open standards.
Today, we’re donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation , co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Bloomberg.
One year ago, we introduced MCP as a universal, open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. Since then, MCP has achieved incredible adoption:
We’re continuing to invest in MCP’s growth. Claude now has a directory with over 75 connectors (powered by MCP), and we recently launched Tool Search and Programmatic Tool Calling capabilities in our API to help optimize production-scale MCP deployments, handling thousands of tools efficiently and reducing latency in complex agent workflows.
The Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI , with support from Google , Microsoft , AWS , Cloudflare and Bloomberg . The AAIF aims to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently, collaboratively, and in the public interest through strategic investment, community building, and shared development of open standards.
MCP now has an official, community-driven Registry for discovering available MCP servers, and the November 25th spec release introduced many new features, including asynchronous operations, statelessness, server identity, and official extensions. There are also official SDKs (Software Development Kits) for MCP in all major programming languages with 97M+ monthly SDK downloads across Python and TypeScript.
Since its inception, we’ve been committed to ensuring MCP remains open-source, community-driven and vendor-neutral. Today, we further that commitment by donating MCP to the Linux Foundation.
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the growth of sustainable, open-source ecosystems through neutral stewardship, community building, and shared infrastructure. It has decades of experience stewarding the most critical and globally-significant open-source projects, including The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch. Importantly, the Linux Foundation has a proven track record in facilitating open collaboration and maintaining vendor neutrality.
The move strengthens open‑source foundations for agentic AI, ensuring neutral standards and fostering collaboration across major industry players.