Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation

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.

Model Context Protocol

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:

• Across the ecosystem: There are now more than 10,000 active public MCP servers, covering everything from developer tools to Fortune 500 deployments;
• Across platforms: MCP has been adopted by ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Visual Studio Code, and other popular AI products;
• Across infrastructure: Enterprise-grade infrastructure now exists with deployment support for MCP from providers including AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

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.

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 and the Agentic AI 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 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.

Donating the Model Context Protocol

Anthropic is donating the Model Context Protocol to the Linux Foundation's new Agentic AI Foundation, where it will join goose by Block and AGENTS.md by OpenAI as founding projects. Bringing these and future projects under the AAIF will foster innovation across the agentic AI ecosystem and ensure these foundational technologies remain neutral, open, and community-driven.

The Model Context Protocol’s governance model will remain unchanged: the project’s maintainers will continue to prioritize community input and transparent decision-making.

The future of MCP

Open-source software is essential for building a secure and innovative ecosystem for agentic AI. Today’s donation to the Linux Foundation demonstrates our commitment to ensuring MCP remains a neutral, open standard. We’re excited to continue contributing to MCP and other agentic AI projects through the AAIF.

Learn more about MCP at modelcontextprotocol.io and get involved with the AAIF here.