OpenAI, Anthropic, and JetBrains join the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation to build shared, open standards. A pivot from walled gardens to community-driven agentic AI.
The tech world just took a step forward or sideways, depending on how you view it, with the creation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block have placed three foundational tools- AGENTS.MD, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Goose under a neutral, open-governance roof via the Linux Foundation.
This move rewrites the emerging AI era’s narrative.
These players are betting on collaboration and interoperability rather than competing in isolated silos, each company building its proprietary agent stack. AGENTS.md, donated by OpenAI, gives developers a consistent way to encode instructions for AI agents across projects.
MCP, originally by Anthropic, acts like a universal “connector”- letting agents plug into tools, data sources, and external workflows without reinventing adapters. Goose from Block offers a reference framework for actually running agents in a “plug-and-play” style.
Then there’s JetBrains joining AAIF, a sign that mainstream developer infrastructure firms are taking agentic AI seriously, not just as hype but as the next step in software tooling.
It isn’t polite collaboration. But a strategic gambit.
The idea? Avoid a fractured future where each AI-agent ecosystem speaks its own language. Agents built with AGENTS.md + MCP + Goose (or compatible tools) should interoperate- making them more portable, reusable, and secure at scale with AAIF.
Still, whether AAIF delivers on this promise remains to be seen. Standard-setting efforts often falter under corporate pressures, competing priorities, or simply inertia. AAIF will need real community engagement and sustained contributions beyond the founding giants. If it pulls that off, we could see agentic AI move from closed lab experiments into a true open ecosystem- where building once really does work everywhere.
