Anthropic has announced the donation of its Model Context Protocol, known as MCP, to the newly established Agentic AI Foundation, a specialized initiative housed within the Linux Foundation. This move, revealed today, aims to bolster the open-source landscape for agentic AI technologies. The foundation itself was co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, and receives backing from major players including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg.
MCP emerged exactly one year ago as an open, universal framework designed to link AI applications seamlessly with outside systems. In that short time, it has seen remarkable uptake across the industry. Developers and enterprises have spun up over 10,000 public MCP servers, spanning from everyday coding tools to implementations at some of the world’s largest companies.
The protocol’s reach extends to leading AI platforms as well, with integrations in tools like ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code. On the infrastructure side, robust support has rolled out from cloud giants such as AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, making it easier for businesses to deploy at scale.
Anthropic continues to pour resources into expanding MCP’s capabilities. For instance, its Claude AI now features a collection of more than 75 connectors built on the protocol. The company recently unveiled new API features, including Tool Search and Programmatic Tool Calling, which streamline the management of thousands of tools in production environments, cutting down on delays in intricate AI agent processes.
Community efforts have also advanced the project, with an official registry for MCP servers now live on GitHub to help users find and explore options. The latest specification update, released on November 25, brought enhancements like support for asynchronous tasks, stateless operations, secure server verification, and standardized extensions. Official software development kits are available for key programming languages, racking up over 97 million downloads per month just in Python and TypeScript.
From the start, Anthropic has emphasized keeping MCP as an open-source effort guided by the community and free from any single vendor’s influence. Handing it over to the Linux Foundation aligns with that vision, using the organization’s long history of nurturing vital open projects like the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Node.js, and PyTorch.
The Linux Foundation operates as a nonprofit focused on sustainable open-source communities through impartial oversight and collaborative tools. Under its umbrella, the Agentic AI Foundation seeks to guide the development of autonomous AI systems in a way that prioritizes openness, joint efforts, and broader societal benefits via funding, gatherings, and shared standards.
As part of this donation, MCP will stand alongside Block’s goose framework and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md as core initiatives within the foundation. This grouping is expected to spark further creativity in the agentic AI space while safeguarding these tools’ accessibility and independence. The protocol’s existing governance structure, which stresses input from contributors and clear processes, will stay intact.
Open-source foundations like this are crucial for creating trustworthy and forward-thinking environments for AI agents, according to Anthropic. The company plans to keep supporting MCP and related work through the Agentic AI Foundation.
For more details on MCP, visit modelcontextprotocol.io. To engage with the Agentic AI Foundation, head to aaif.io.
