OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block just launched the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, transferring ownership of key AI agent technologies to create open standards. The move signals a major shift toward interoperable AI systems that can communicate across platforms, potentially reshaping how businesses deploy autonomous AI agents.
The AI industry just made its biggest bet yet on autonomous agents working together. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block announced they're cofounding the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, transferring ownership of critical AI agent technologies to create industry-wide standards.
The foundation immediately gains control of three essential tools that developers already use to build AI agents. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets agents connect and interact with each other, while OpenAI's Agents.md allows websites to specify rules for coding agents. Block is contributing Goose, its framework that taps multiple language models to perform computer tasks.
"MCP is used by many companies, but there are others [who don't use it]," Nick Cooper, who leads protocol work at OpenAI, told Wired. Making these tools open standards should encourage broader adoption and integration across the industry.
The timing reflects a crucial shift happening right now. While chatbots dominated 2023, the focus is moving toward AI agents that actually do things - book flights, manage transactions, negotiate deals. These systems need to talk to each other seamlessly, and that's where standardization becomes critical.
Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI's CTO of B2B applications, envisions armies of AI agents routinely communicating in business settings. "Open source is going to play a very big role in how AI is shaped and adopted in the real world," he said in the Wired interview.
But there's more at stake than technical interoperability. The foundation already has backing from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare - essentially creating a US-led consortium to define how AI agents operate globally.
