OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block have cofounded a new open source organization—the Agentic AI Foundation—to promote standards for artificial intelligence agents.

The three companies are also transferring ownership of some widely used agentic technologies over to the foundation. This includes Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows agents to connect and interact; OpenAI’s Agents.md, which lets programs and websites specify rules for coding agents; and Goose, a framework for building agents developed by Block. These technologies were already free to use, but through the new foundation it will be possible for others to contribute to their development.

“MCP is used by many companies, but there are others [who don’t use it],” says Nick Cooper, who leads work on the protocol at OpenAI. Cooper says that making MCP an open standard should encourage developers and companies to embrace it and build systems that integrate agentic AI. “That open interoperability—that open standard—really means that companies can talk across providers, and across agentic systems.”

The Agentic AI Foundation is being created under the Linux Foundation, which oversees development of the widely used open source Linux operating system as well as other projects. The foundation provides legal and technological support for the creation of open source foundations. Other companies who have signed on to the AAIF, beyond the three founding members, include Google, Microsoft, AWS, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare.

The new foundation reflects a nascent shift from chat-based AI systems to greater use of programs that take actions on behalf of users. This kind of agentic AI promises a potentially lucrative new paradigm in which AI agents use the web and negotiate with one another to power all sorts of applications. Consumers may, for example, use AI assistants to buy and book things, while businesses use AI agents to manage transactions and customer interactions.

Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B applications at OpenAI, envisions a time when large numbers of AI agents routinely communicate with one another in the course of business. The AI industry working across the same open standards should help ensure that those interactions happen seamlessly. “Open source is going to play a very big role in how AI is shaped and adopted in the real world,” Narayanan says.

The question of openness seems crucial to AI right now. US companies mostly make money by offering access to powerful closed models through application programming interfaces, or APIs. Meta previously released the weights for its best model, Llama, so that anyone could download and run it, although the company has recently signaled a shift to a more closed approach. A number of Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and Z.ai, provide strong open source models that have become popular with developers, startups, and AI researchers. Some worry that this picture could give Chinese firms a big strategic advantage over time.

OpenAI also has a number of open source efforts, including a model called gpt-oss and Codex CLI, software for the command line interface for its models.

Just as open standards helped the web flourish, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block believe that openness will remove barriers to the deployment of agentic AI across the economy. Although there is nothing in the standards requiring people to use foundation models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Block, they believe that openness should ultimately benefit their businesses.

Manik Surtani, head of open source at Block, says the company’s Goose agent, which taps into a wide range of LLMs to perform actions on a computer, has soared in popularity over the past year. Donating Goose to the new AAIF makes it easier for anyone to contribute back to the code base and build on top of it, he says.

“MCP, Agents.md, and Goose have become essential tools for developers building this new class of agentic technologies," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in a statement. "Bringing these projects together under the AAIF ensures they can grow with the transparency and stability that only open governance provides. The Linux Foundation is proud to serve as the neutral home where they will continue to build AI.”

Open standards may be technologically neutral, but if these agentic tools become globally dominant they could confer the US companies behind them considerable influence. Just as the standards managed by ICANN and WC3 have shaped the evolution of the web, the new foundation could perhaps help the US determine how AI gets used on a daily basis worldwide.

This is an edition ofWill Knight’sAI Lab newsletter. Read previous newslettershere.