Dive Brief:
- Anthropic is pushing for open AI development with the donation of the Model Context Protocol, a universal standard that enables AI applications to connect to external systems, to the nonprofit Linux Foundation. The newly formed Agentic AI Foundation will govern the project, Anthropic said Tuesday.
- Co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI – with support from Google, AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare and Bloomberg – the AAIF aims to ensure transparent development of agentic AI, the release said. Anthropic’s MCP donation joins OpenAI’s Agents.md, an open format to guide AI agent development, and AI agent Goose by Block, as founding projects for the AAIF.
- “The more often tech companies implement and improve upon this standard, the faster we work towards that plateau of productivity, and that’s what we need for increased enterprise adoption,” Gartner Analyst Jim Scheibmeir said in an email to CIO Dive.
Dive Insight:
Tech companies are capitalizing on the growing wave of enterprise AI agent adoption by establishing standards for the technology’s development that allow greater interoperability between different systems. By 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents, Gartner predicts.
Retailers, financial services firms, beauty products, food and beverage makers and others are considering how to incorporate AI agents to improve customer service, support employees and improve business operations. Walmart, for example, deploys “super agents” to support customer shopping experiences, assist suppliers and centralize information.
With enterprises finding and acting on use cases, vendors are taking steps to ensure the rapidly growing number of agents can talk to each other.
Anthropic first released MCP in November 2024, and it has since grown in popularity with Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini adopting the standard. Salesforce announced in June 2025 that Agentforce 3 also supports MCP as interoperability plays a crucial role in the company’s overall AI strategy.
The AAIF will provide a neutral foundation for a shared and open ecosystem of standards, innovation and tools for AI agent development, according to the Linux Foundation, which fosters and supports open source ecosystems.
“Within just one year, MCP, AGENTS.md and goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said in a press release. “Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides.”
But MCP implementation faces some hurdles, including security concerns and frequent updates for early adopters, Scheibmeir said.
Still, MCP adoption is anticipated to grow among enterprises in 2026. Its donation to the Linux Foundation will be a “net positive for the protocol’s future,” Scheibmeir added.
“The more enterprises experience [MCP] through vendor-created solutions, the more enterprises will implement within their own software engineering efforts,” Scheibmeir said.
