In the past year we’ve seen the rapid rise of Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a standard method to connect AI agents to diverse data sources, regardless of what company developed the agent or the system housing the data.
While virtually all of the AI market’s top vendors have embraced MCP and either announced or delivered products, the spec gained even more momentum in terms of vendor neutrality earlier this month.
Anthropic, developer of MCP, has donated MCP to become an open-source project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation and a fund specifically being steered by Anthropic, OpenAI and other industry titans.
“MCP being donated to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) was the right move, benefiting the entire industry by encouraging vendor neutrality when it comes to AI,” said Harish Peri, senior vice president and general manager of AI at Okta, an identity management software firm that’s a major MCP proponent. “The Linux Foundation has been home to countless open-source projects that we’ve seen shape critical software practices.”
Those open-source projects include Linux itself, Kubernetes, OpenChain, OpenStack, and many others.
MCP Background and Future Direction
MCP’s rapid rise to become the standard for connecting AI models to tools, data and applications is embodied in one critical figure: there are more than 10,000 published MCP servers, including everything from developer tools to Fortune 500 deployments.
Our recent MCP analyses reflect this surge in support, usage, and the value of MCP:
- AI Expert Will Hawkins Labels MCP ‘Incredibly Useful’
- Why MCP Is Becoming the Universal Interface to Enterprise Data
- Cisco Secures MCP Servers With Multiple Scanning Engines
- Microsoft Deepens MCP Support With New Power Apps and Dataverse Servers
- Okta Exec Explains How Protocol Update Strengthens MCP Security
The Linux Foundation said it’s formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to manage MCP as well as two other prominent projects: Block’s goose and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md
Goose is an AI framework that combines language models, tools, and MCP-based integration for a structured environment to build agentic workflows. AGENTS.md gives coding agents project-specific guidance needed to operate across different repositories and toolchains while making agent behavior more predictable.
In addition to the aforementioned members of the AAIF, supporters at launch include Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Okta, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and many more.
Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, explained the company’s donation of MCP: “Donating MCP to the Linux Foundation as part of the AAIF ensures it stays open, neutral, and community-driven as it becomes critical infrastructure for AI. We remain committed to supporting and advancing MCP, and with the Linux Foundation’s decades of experience stewarding the projects that power the internet, this is just the beginning.”
Okta’s Peri explained why his company joined AIIF: “We want to make sure that identity security is a part of any conversation when it comes to building a secure and interoperable ecosystem.” He added, “MCP is now taking another step forward in becoming more collaborative, ensuring that AI evolves with the public’s interest in mind.”
The moves by Anthropic, Linux Foundation and those vendors supporting AAIF should give customers high confidence that MCP will continue to thrive and advance, smoothing the way to continued AI deployments that drive deeper penetration of AI into core business processes, and a continued rapid pace of innovation.
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Tom Smith
Analyst
Cloud Wars, Agent and Copilot
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