Donating the Model Context Protocol and Establishing the Agentic AI Foundation

Summary

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 ProtocolOne 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 FoundationThe Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the growth of sustainab...